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      US deports 250 alleged gang members to El Salvador despite court ruling to halt flights

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      The US deported more than 250 mainly Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador despite a US judge’s ruling to halt the flights on Saturday after Donald Trump controversially invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime.El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and 23 members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 had arrived and were in custody as part of a deal under which the US will pay the Central American country to hold them in its 40,000-person capacity “terrorism confinement centre”.The confirmation came hours after a US federal judge expanded his ruling temporarily blocking the Trump administration from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority that allows the president broad leeway on policy and executive action to speed up mass deportations.The US district judge James Boasberg had attempted to halt the deportations for all individuals deemed eligible for removal under Trump’s proclamation, which was issued on Friday. Boasberg also ordered deportation flights already in the air to return to the US.“Oopsie … Too late,” Bukele posted online, followed by a laughing emoji.Soon after Bukele’s statement, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, thanked El Salvador’s leader.“Thank you for your assistance and friendship, President Bukele,” he wrote on the social media site X, following up on an earlier post in which he said the US had sent “2 dangerous top MS-13 leaders plus 21 of its most wanted back to face justice in El Salvador”.Rubio added that “over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars”.On Friday, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to order the deportations of suspected members of the Venezuelan gang he has accused of “unlawfully infiltrating” the US. The US formally designated Tren de Aragua a “foreign terrorist organization” last month.View image in fullscreenHe claimed the gang members were “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions” against the US.The Alien Enemies Act has only ever been used three times before, most recently during the second world war, when it was used to incarcerate Germans and Italians as well as for the mass internment of Japanese-American civilians.It was originally passed by Congress in preparation for what the US believed would be an impending war with France. It was also used during the war of 1812 and during the first world war. The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, slammed Judge Boasberg’s stay on deportations. “This order disregards well-established authority regarding President Trump’s power, and it puts the public and law enforcement at risk,” Bondi said in a statement on Saturday night.But lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union contend that the Trump does not have the authority to use the law against a criminal gang, rather than a recognized state.On Sunday, the Republican senator Mike Rounds questioned whether the deportation flights had ignored Judge Boasberg’s order to turn around. “We’ll find out whether or not that actually occurred or not,” Rounds told CNN. “I don’t know about the timing on it. I do know that we will follow the law.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEl Salvador’s multimillion-dollar “terrorism confinement centre” – which is known by its Spanish acronym Cecot – is the centerpiece of Bukele’s highly controversial anti-gang crackdown which has seen tens of thousands of people jailed since it was launched in March 2022.The 40,000-capacity “mega-prison” was opened at the start of 2023 and has since become an essential destination for rightwing Latin American populists keen to burnish their crime-fighting credentials with voters. “This is the way. Tough on crime,” Argentina’s hardline security minister, Patricia Bullrich, enthused last year after posing outside Cecot’s packed cells.A succession of social media influencers and foreign journalists have also been invited to tour the prison to document its harsh conditions and help Bukele promote his clampdown, which has helped dramatically reduce El Salvador’s once sky-high murder rate.“The conditions in there are like something you’ve never seen … Depending on which side of the argument you fall on, it’s either the ultimate deterrent or it’s an abuse of human rights,” the Australian TV journalist Liam Bartlett reported after visiting El Salvador’s “hellhole” prison recently.“There’s no sheets [and] no mattresses. [Prisoners] sleep on cold steel frames and they eat the same meal every single day. Utensils are banned so they use their hands [to eat]. There’s just two open toilets in each of these massive cells and the lights stay on 24/7,” Bartlett added. “Imagine how long you would last in these conditions.”Human rights activists have decried how the mass imprisonments have taken place largely without legal process. More than 100 prisoners have died behind bars since Bukele’s clampdown began.Neither the US nor El Salvador offered any immediate evidence that the scores of Venezuelan prisoners sent to Cecot this weekend were in fact gang members or had been convicted of any offense. More

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      Russell T Davies: gay society in ‘greatest danger I’ve ever seen’ after Trump win

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      Russell T Davies has said gay society is in the “greatest danger I have ever seen”, since the election of Donald Trump as US president in November.Speaking to the Guardian at the Gaydio Pride awards in Manchester on Friday, the Doctor Who screenwriter said the rise in hostility was not limited to the US but “is here [in the UK] now”.“As a gay man, I feel like a wave of anger, and violence, and resentment is heading towards us on a vast scale,” he said.“I’ve literally seen a difference in the way I’m spoken to as a gay man since that November election, and that’s a few months of weaponising hate speech, and the hate speech creeps into the real world.”“I’m not being alarmist,” he added. “I’m 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we’re in the greatest danger I have ever seen.”Since his inauguration, Trump has ended policies giving LGBTQ+ Americans protection from discrimination. He has also restricted access to gender-affirming healthcare, said the US would only recognise two sexes, and barred transgender people from enlisting in the military.Davies also used his keynote speech at the awards ceremony, which rewards the efforts made to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the UK, to criticise Trump, and the president’s ally Elon Musk.“I think times are darkening beyond all measure and beyond anything I have seen in my lifetime,” he told the audience, which included the singers Louise Redknapp and Katy B, and the Traitors contestants Leanne Quigley and Minah Shannon.Davies said he had turned 18 and left home in 1981, adding: “And that is exactly the year that rumours and whispers of a strange new virus came along, which came to haunt our community and to test us in so many ways.”“The joyous thing about this is that we fought back,” he said. The community “militarised, campaigned, marched and demanded the medicine”.He added: “We demanded the science. We demanded the access.”When he wrote the TV series Queer As Folk in the late 1990s, he said, it was part of a movement, with writers “fomenting ideas” and putting gay and lesbian characters on screen.Had he been asked to imagine then what life for LGBTQ+ people would be like in 2025, “I want to say it’s going to be all rainbows,” he said, “skipping down the street hand-in-hand, equality, equality, equality.”But the peril the gay community now faced, he said, was even greater than that in the 1980s.“The threat from America, it’s like something at The Lord of the Rings. It’s like an evil rising in the west, and it is evil,” Davies said.“We’ve had bad prime ministers and we’ve had bad presidents before. What we’ve never had is a billionaire tech baron openly hating his trans daughter,” he added.Musk, the de facto head of the “department of government efficiency”, bought the social networking site Twitter, which he renamed X. A study by the University of California, Berkeley found hate speech on the platform rose by 50% in the months after it was bought by the billionaire.“We have never had this in the history of the world,” Davies said. “It is terrifying because he and the people like him are in control of the facts, they’re in control of information, they’re in control of what people think, and that is what we’re now facing.”But Davies said the gay community would do “what we always do in times of peril, we gather at night”, and would once again come together, and fight against this latest wave of hostility and oppression.“What we will do in Elon Musk’s world, that we’re heading towards, is what artists have always done,” he told the Guardian, “which is to meet in cellars, and plot, and sing, and compose, and paint, and make speeches, and march.”“If we have to be those rebels in basements yet again,” he added, “which is when art thrives, then that’s what we’ll become.” More

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      Washington worried with Trump back in town: ‘The atmosphere is toxic here’

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      It was an audience more accustomed to stifling a cough or resisting the temptation to unwrap a sweet. But when they spotted vice-president JD Vance taking his seat at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington on Thursday night, classical music-goers erupted in unrestrained boos, jeers and shouts of “You ruined this place!”The noisy protest exemplified a culture clash taking place in the nation’s capital. It came in the same week that work began to remove a giant “Black Lives Matter” mural near the White House, a top political columnist quit the Washington Post newspaper and a spending bill passed by the House of Representatives sought to impose drastic budget cuts of $1.1bn on the District of Columbia (DC).Compounding it all, with Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) slashing the federal workforce, some residents fear that Washington could go the way of Detroit half a century ago: a city that loses its principal industry and goes into a downward spiral.“Everybody feels the atmosphere is toxic here and you can’t get away from it,” said Sally Quinn, an author, journalist and socialite. “People are so distraught and so down and in despair. The question is, what can we do? That’s what people are asking in Washington. The biggest feeling of all is impotence: they can’t stop it.”Trump has always been an anachronistic presence in DC, where the Republican lost last year’s presidential election to Democratic opponent Kamala Harris by 86 percentage points. During his first term, he only ventured out to one restaurant in the city – his own – and never attended the annual Kennedy Center Honors or White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.But as in other arenas, Trump’s second term is more direct, determined and intentional, and includes the cultural equivalent of precision air strikes against the mostly liberal residents of Washington.View image in fullscreenOn Monday crews started work to remove a giant yellow “Black Lives Matter” slogan painted on a street one block from the White House. DC mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, had ordered the painting and renamed the intersection Black Lives Matter Plaza in June 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.Its erasure five years later amounts to a public acknowledgement of how vulnerable DC is now that Trump is back in the White House and Republicans control both houses of Congress. The work is expected to take about six weeks and the words will be replaced by an unspecified set of city-sponsored murals.Among those who gathered to witness the work on Monday was Megan Bailiff, chief executive of Equus Striping, the pavement marking company that originally painted the letters. She told the Associated Press its presence was “more significant at this very moment than it ever has been in this country” and described its its removal as “historically obscene”.Trump has seized control of the Kennedy Center, the crown jewel of the city’s performing arts scene, installing himself as chair and loyalist Ric Grenell as president. Numerous artists and producers have cancelled shows, including Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, while ticket sales reportedly dropped roughly 50% week-over-week after Trump announced his takeover.The backlash against Vance at this week’s National Symphony Orchestra concert was a palpable demonstration of the anger. Coming just weeks after the vice-president publicly berated Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, some could not help but note the irony that he was attending all-Russian programme that included Stravinsky’s Petrushka, the story of three puppets brought to life by a charlatan.The booing incident prompted a retort from Grenell, who wrote on the X social media platform: “It troubles me to see that so many in the audience appear to be white and intolerant of diverse political views. Diversity is our strength.” Meanwhile this week Trump added Fox News host Laura Ingraham and Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo to the Kennedy Center’s board.Quinn observed: “They’re being very imaginative in their atrocities. They trashed the Kennedy Center and threw everybody out and put Laura Ingraham on the board. The Kennedy Center has been so much a part of the city for so long and suddenly it’s gone. They’ve lost in the first couple of weeks 50% of their ticket sales. They’re not getting the donations they used to get. All kinds of acts are cancelling and people I know say they won’t ever set foot in that place.”View image in fullscreenThe Trump International hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue is no more but the Maga (Make America great again) movement is gaining a foothold in other parts of the city. Butterworth’s, a bistro on Capitol Hill, has drawn Trump allies including Musk and Kash Patel and has been dubbed “Steve Bannon’s restaurant”.Bannon, who lives nearby but has no formal connection to Butterworth’s, said in a text message it reminds him of one of his favourite areas in London. “It’s Mayfair come to Capitol Hill,” he explained.Co-owner Raheem Kassam, a former editor-in-chief of Breitbart News UK and ex-aide to British rightwing populist Nigel Farage, insisted in an online message: “We are a Capitol Hill restaurant that welcomes everyone and refuses to discriminate based on politics. Our investors come from a range of backgrounds, and includes left-liberals, apolitical-types, LGBT+ people, and minorities.“But frankly, we’re not really interested in ticking boxes. We’re interested in great food and good vibes. If you fancy that, we’re the place for you, no matter who you are. Just please, no hats for dinner service.”Washington has often had a tenuous peace with the federal government when Republicans controlled Congress and the White House. It is now facing its most urgent threat since it was given the power of home rule during the Richard Nixon administration.This week the House passed a continuing resolution to fund the federal government that includes a provision treating DC as a federal agency for budget purposes. This would force DC to revert to its fiscal year 2024 spending levels, resulting in an estimated $1.1bn cut to its current 2025 budget over the remaining six months.The funds are locally raised taxpayer dollars, not federal subsidies. City officials warned of “calamitous reduction in services ranging from schools to public safety”. Washington could face potential hiring freezes, layoffs across various agencies, renegotiation or termination of leases and decreased security and janitorial services.Paul Strauss, shadow US senator for DC, said: “I’m shocked that it’s now House Republicans that are taking steps to defund the police, which was normally a position staked out by extreme members of the far left. To have the House vote to cut the police budget so substantially seems difficult to understand.”After final passage of the continuing resolution, the Senate unanimously passed a bill by voice vote to restore the $1.1bn in spending cuts to the DC government. The DC bill, which Trump supports, must still be approved by the House when it returns on 24 March.Democrats and DC officials view the proposed budget cuts as politically motivated, potentially aimed at undermining the self-governance of the predominantly Democratic city. Trump has previously suggested that DC would be better off under total federal control.View image in fullscreenSuch is the concern that Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, even floated the idea that Washington could be temporarily incorporated into Maryland. Raskin said on the City Cast DC podcast: “If you guys want to think about coming back to Maryland for this period, you would definitely be safer in the free state than you’d be under the brutal thumb of Maga colonialism.”Simultaneously, Washington is facing economic headwinds due to deep federal job cuts orchestrated by Doge under the Trump administration. Unemployment claims recently rose 25% in one week and are four times as high as one year earlier. Glen Lee, the district’s chief financial officer, has forecast that DC could lose 40,000 federal jobs – down by a fifth – and projected a loss of revenue of $1bn over the next three years.Bill Galston, a chair in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank, noted that the federal government is a vast establishment with 2.3 million workers spread across the country, of whom 80% are not in Washington. “So I don’t think that life in Washington DC has been upended yet,” he said.“What there has been and of course is is a pell-mell replacement of a sense of security with a pretty near total sense of insecurity. The sense of what might happen to an individual is a larger effect than the actual firings. People are hunkering down.”The shift in Trump’s second term has been more dramatic than anyone expected, added Galston, a resident of 43 years. “There’s an element of incredulity. People who tried to imagine in the starkest possible detail what could happen almost universally concede that, while they have let their imaginations run riot, they feel they didn’t go far enough.“There is something slightly surreal about all of this, but I wake up in the morning and I walk down the driveway in a very old fashioned way for my three newspapers and I open up the package and it’s very real.”As Doge downsizes the government, the Trump administration has considered offloading numerous federal properties, raising concerns about vacant buildings and a decline similar to that of Detroit after the car manufacturing industry was gutted. An essay in the New York Times newspaper this week was headlined: “DC Is Becoming Another Hollowed-Out Company Town.”View image in fullscreenQuinn said: “It is a one industry town, and basically what they’re doing is destroying the government, which is what Trump said he would do. Even Trump supporters are stunned. I know from some of my friends on the Hill that Republican senators and congressmen are freaking out, too, because they’re hearing from their constituents.”Quinn was married to the late Ben Bradlee, who was editor of the Washington Post when it reported on the Watergate scandal, which forced Nixon’s resignation. Long a vital part of the fabric of the city, the storied newspaper has been in freefall, financially and editorially, over the past year.Billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who donated to and attended Trump’s inauguration, recently ordered that the paper narrow the topics covered by its opinion section to personal liberties and the free market. Opinions editor David Shipley resigned because of the shift. This week Ruth Marcus, who had worked at the Post since 1984, also quit. Several star reporters have left in recent months.David Maraniss, a former associate editor of the Post who recently resigned after 48 years at the paper, said: “What’s happening at the Post is connected to Trump and that’s very disturbing to me. I don’t think Bezos genuflecting to an autocrat is something I want to have any part of. I consider the Post a public trust almost. That sounds sort of idealistic and naive but it’s larger than an owner; it’s an identity.“What it represents in terms of journalistic ethics and integrity has been damaged almost beyond repair and this is a time when newspapers of that sort are needed more than ever. For us to recede from that push for freedom of speech, the First Amendment, for the search for truth is depressing to me.”For many of Trump’s critics, Washington feels like a city under occupation. Maraniss added: “It’s the second occupation but it seems more pronounced than the first. My feelings are complicated by a double whammy of what’s happening in my newspaper and in the city, in the country and in the world. It all seems wrapped together. In terms of Washington there’s anxiety, a feeling of a darkness coming over the city and enormous uncertainty about what people should do.” More

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      ‘Maga since forever’: mercenary mogul Erik Prince pushes to privatize Trump deportation plans

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      Silicon Valley has played a sizable part in the early days of Donald Trump’s new administration, but another familiar face in the Maga-verse is beginning to emerge: businessman Erik Prince, often described by his critics as a living “Bond villain”.Prince is the most famous mercenary of the contemporary era and the founder of the now defunct private military company Blackwater. For a time, it was a prolific privateer in the “war on terror”, racking up millions in US government contracts by providing soldiers of fortune to the CIA, Pentagon and beyond.Now he is a central figure among a web of other contractors trying to sell Trump advisers on a $25bn deal to privatize the mass deportations of 12 million migrants.In an appearance on NewsNation, he immediately tried to temper that his plan had any traction.“No indications, so far,” said Prince about a federal contract materializing. “Eventually if they’re going to hit those kinds of numbers and scale, they’re going to need additional private sector.”But the news had people wondering, how is Prince going to factor into the second Trump presidency?Sean McFate, a professor at Georgetown University who has advised the Pentagon and the CIA, said: “Erik Prince has always been politically connected to Maga, the Maga movement, and that’s going back to 2015.”Prince, himself a special forces veteran and ex-Navy Seal, is a known business associate of Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first electoral win. Prince even appeared with him last July at a press conference before Bannon surrendered to authorities and began a short prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena.“He comes from a wealthy Republican family,” said McFate, who has authored books on the global mercenary industry and is familiar with Prince’s history. “His sister, Betsy DeVos, is the former education secretary, and he’s been a Maga, not just a Maga, he’s been a Steve Bannon, Maga Breitbart Republican, since forever.”Beginning during the two Bush administrations, Blackwater was a major recipient of Pentagon money flowing into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a massacre in Baghdad at the hands of some of his contractors led to prison sentences, congressional inquiries and blacklistings of the firm.Years later, Trump would come to the rescue: pardoning all of the Blackwater mercenaries involved in the massacre.Now, with the current administration, which is doling out free advertising to Elon Musk and other Maga loyalists, Prince has a new and familiar ally in Washington.“This is a big market time for him,” said McFate. “He’s very quiet when there’s a Democrat in the White House and gets very noisy when a Republican, especially Trump, is in the White House; I expect this to be one of many things he will try to pitch.”Do you have tips about private military contractors or the world of Erik Prince? Tip us securely here or text Ben Makuch at BenMakuch.90 on Signal.McFate said Prince is nothing if not an “opportunist” and an “egotist” with a penchant for getting into media cycles.“If Trump or somebody says ‘That’s an interesting idea,’ he will pump out a PowerPoint slideshow proposing an idea, whether or not he can do it,” he said. Prince also has the ear of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and was a character witness for her Senate confirmation.There’s no denying Prince is a relentless pitchman, offering world governments billion-dollar plans to privatize wars or other less expensive espionage activities. For example, he was recently named to the advisory board of the London-based private intelligence firm Vantage Intelligence, which advises “sovereign wealth funds” and other “high-net-worth individuals”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPost-Blackwater and under new companies, he has proposed missions in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Congo, Libya and, purportedly, Venezuela – a country he often mentions as ripe for overthrow on his podcast, Off Leash.A senior commander in an alliance of former Venezuelan soldiers who defected from the Chavista regime told the Guardian his organization has been asking Prince for help against the country’s current president, Nicolás Maduro.“We have sent messages to Mr Erik Prince to try to see if we can meet,” said Javier Nieto Quintero, a Florida-based former captain in the Venezuelan military and leader of the Venezuelan dissident organization Carive. “If he wants, we can provide help, support in terms of information, intelligence, or any other area based on the freedom of our country.”Nieto Quintero, who said Prince has yet to respond, and Carive was used in a failed operation against Maduro in 2020 led by a former Green Beret. In what is notoriously known as the “Bay of Piglets”, six of Nieto Quintero’s men were killed and close to 100 captured, including two former US servicemen recruited for the job who were freed two years ago from a Caracas prison.Prince’s eye has undoubtedly been focused on Venezuela, a country with vast oil reserves that has long been in the crosshairs of Trump’s retinue. In recent months, Prince has supported a Venezuelan opposition movement called Ya Casi Venezuela, claiming to have raised more than $1m for it over the summer. The Maduro regime is now investigating Prince’s links to the campaign, which it paints as a sort of front for western governments fostering its downfall.Venezuela has reason to fear Prince and his connections to American spies: the CIA, with a rich history of covert actions in Latin America, was at least aware of a plot to overthrow Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez in 2002.“We were in contact with Ya Casi Venezuela, but a meeting never took place,” said Nieto Quintero. “We have continued to grow and strengthen our ranks and our doctrine, our plans, our institutional, military, security and defense proposals.”Prince is officially active in the region. Last week, Ecuador announced it would be partnering with Prince in a “strategic alliance” to reinforce the country’s controversial “war on crime” with his expertise.Prince did not respond to a request for comment sent through his encrypted cellphone company, Unplugged. Ya Casi Venezuela did not answer numerous emails about its relationship with Prince. As of now, no business deal between the Trump administration and Prince has been signed or publicly disclosed.But across his career as both a shadowy contractor and a political figure, who just graced the stages of the latest Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to applause and then spoke to Harvard Republicans, the public and private sides of Prince remain somewhat antithetical.“He likes to be in the news, which makes him a very bad mercenary,” said McFate. “Frankly, most mercenaries I talk to in Africa, the big ones, despise him.” More

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      The ‘Iron Mountain’ hoax: how anti-Vietnam war satire sparked today’s conspiracy theories

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      We live in a ­blizzard of fake news, ­disinformation and ­conspiracy theories. It’s tempting to blame this on social media – which does indeed ­exacerbate the problem. And AI deepfakes promise to make the situation even worse. But at root this is not about technology: it’s about how humans think, as an astonishing case that long predates the internet reveals. This is an amazing story – about the perils of amazing stories.In November 1967, at the height of the war in Vietnam, a strange ­document was published in New York. Report from Iron Mountain was the work of a top-secret “­special study group” recruited by the Kennedy administration to scope out what would happen to the US if permanent global peace broke out. It warned the end of war, and of the fear of war, would wreck America’s economy, even its whole society. To replace the effects, extreme measures would be required – eugenics, fake alien scares, pollution, blood games. Even slavery. The report was so incendiary it had been suppressed, but one of the study group leaked it, determined that the public learn the truth. It caused a furore. The worried memos, demanding someone check if this document was real, went all the way up to President Johnson.View image in fullscreenIn reality, as the White House eventually realised, Report from Iron Mountain was a hoax. It was the brainchild of leftwing satirists: Victor Navasky, editor of a magazine called Monocle, his colleagues, and a fellow satirist, Leonard Lewin, who wrote it with the help of luminaries like the famous economist and former US ambassador to India, JK Galbraith. Their goal was to expose what they saw as the insanity driving the intervention in Vietnam, and the whole of the cold war. By presenting their fake report as a real leak, they aimed to make people ask if this insane document might be real – and what that said about the people running the US government.And it worked. To young Americans living under the shadow of conscription, Report seemed all too plausible. Officials whispered to journalists that some of their ­colleagues really did think like this. Once the hoax had its satirical impact, Lewin came clean. But his work was so convincing it began to take on a life of its own.In the late 1980s, Report from Iron Mountain was discovered by the extreme right, which was convinced it was real. It was republished by a company called the Noontide Press, part of a network of fringe organisations that were among America’s primary promoters of Holocaust denial. These ­people were convinced they had found the smoking gun, confirming their darkest suspicions about the government’s secret plots to start wars and control the ­public. A ­horrified Lewin embarked on a long legal battle to take back control of his work and its true, meaning.But meanwhile, the militia movement spreading across the US seized on Report from Iron Mountain, as fuel for its paranoid visions of imminent oppression at the hands of the ­one-world government and its black helicopters. And Lewin’s creation found its way to Hollywood. In JFK, Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie about the Kennedy assassination, the great revelation about why the president was assassinated hinges on a character repeating the hoax’s claims in the belief that they were disturbing truths.View image in fullscreenReport even spawned a secondary hoax: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. This ­purported to be the operations ­manual that helped the elite control its ­sheeple-civilians. This strange text was first popularised by the pioneering conspiracist Milton William Cooper, who ­published it in Behold a Pale Horse, his influential compendium of ­conspiracy theories. Cooper also included extracts from Report from Iron Mountain itself (and, horrifyingly, another hoax: that notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Silent Weapons has often been cited by arch ­conspiracist Alex Jones and has been invoked by “Q”, the ostensible government insider revered by the QAnon movement.Lewin and his colleagues had contrived their hoax so expertly that they inadvertently created “evidence” for a host of conspiracy theories. It could be used to explain everything from why wars end to the real reasons behind lockdown, from environmental regulations and terrorist attacks to the fiery end of a cult in Waco, Texas.The reasoning at work here is revealing. If something in Report chimes with what is really happening in the world, the conspiracist’s logic runs, that cannot be a coincidence. Rather, it exposes the secret motives that caused that reality. The ­principle here – a ­consistent fallacy of ­conspiracy theory – is that “nothing is accidental”. One online ­analysis of Report from Iron Mountain in 2014 even decided the fact Lewin later wrote a novel was an attempt to ­retrospectively create a cover ­identity so he could pretend Report was fiction too.And yet the fate of this all-too-successful hoax also suggests what we might need to do to ­counter this kind of thinking. In a political ­climate roiled by conspiracy ­theories and disinformation, the tale of Report from Iron Mountain is a warning about the ­consequences of taking your eye off the line between compelling stories and what we know to be true.Phil Tinline is the author of Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax That Duped America and Its Sinister Legacy, which will be published by Head of Zeus on 27 March. More

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      Trump invokes 18th-century wartime act to deport five Venezuelans

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      Donald Trump has invoked the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport five Venezuelan nationals from the US.In a presidential proclamation issued on Saturday, the White House said: “Tren de Aragua (TdA) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”The invocation of the wartime act comes just hours after a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s administration from using the 1798 Act to carry out its intended deportations of the Venezuelans.On Saturday, US district judge James Boasberg of the federal district court in Washington DC agreed to issue temporary restraining order that prevents the Venezuelans’ deportation for 14 days.“Given the exigent circumstances that it [the court] has been made aware of this morning, it has determined that an immediate Order is warranted to maintain the status quo until a hearing can be set,” Boasberg wrote in his order.Boasberg’s decision comes in response to a lawsuit filed the same day by the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward. The organizations charge that the Trump administration unlawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act.In the lawsuit, ACLU and Democracy Forward argue the act has been invoked only three times in the history of the US: the war of 1812, first world war and second world war.“It cannot be used here against nationals of a country – Venezuela – with whom the United States is not at war, which is not invading the United States and which has not launched a predatory incursion into the United States,” the lawsuit stated.“The government’s proclamation would allow agents to immediately put noncitizens on planes without any review of any aspect of the determination that they are alien enemies,” the lawsuit added.A remote hearing has been scheduled for today at 5pm before Boasberg. Both ACLU and Democracy Forward will ask that the temporary restraining order be broadened to everyone in danger of removal under the act, the civil liberties organizations said.The president had previously ordered his administration to designate Venezuela’s Tren De Aragua gang as a foreign terrorist organization.With Trump characterizing the gang as a foreign force that is invading the US, civil liberties organizations such as the ACLU fear that Trump may invoke the 1798 act “unlawfully during peacetime to accelerate mass deportations, sidestepping the limits of this wartime authority and the procedures and protections in immigration law.”The invocation is expected to face legal challenges almost immediately. The 227-year-old law is designed to primarily be used in wartime, and only Congress has the authority to declare a war. But the president does have the discretion to invoke the law to defend against a “threatened or ongoing invasion or predatory incursion”, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan authority on law and policy.“This law shouldn’t be invoked because migration is not an invasion, and we’re not in a war time,” said Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, the deputy director of federal advocacy for United We Dream, an immigrant rights organization. “It’s extremely horrifying that we, as immigrants, are being labeled as terrorists, as invaders.”Those subject to the Alien Enemies Act could be deported without a court hearing or asylum interview, and their cases would be governed by wartime authority rather than by immigration law.The Alien Enemies Act specifically allows the president to detain, relocate, or deport immigrants based on their country of ancestry – and crucially covers not only citizens of hostile nations but also “natives”, which could include people who may have renounced their foreign citizenship and sought legal residency in the US.The centuries-old law was also used to arrest more than 31,000 people – mostly people of Japanese, German and Italian ancestry – as “alien enemies” during the second world war, and played a role in the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war.Trump has been building his case for invoking the act for years by characterizing the influx of migrants at the southern border as an “invasion”. He also previewed his invocation in an executive order on his inauguration day, directing the secretaries of state to plan by preparing facilities “necessary to expedite the removal” of those subject to the act.“By invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to US soil, including our cities and inner cities,” he said in his inaugural address.Though anti-immigrant politicians and groups have long advocated for the use of the act in response to unlawful border crossings, Macedo do Nascimento said a number of executive orders and congressional policies have already broadened the federal government’s authorities to detain and deport immigrants.“There are already laws that allow for mass detention. There are already laws, like the Laiken Riley Act, that would broaden the dragnet of people who can be detained,” Macedo do Nascimento said. “So the idea of him invoking the Alien Enemies Act feels kind of needless. To me, it is really about building the narrative to label immigrants as terrorists.” More

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      Ukraine ceasefire plans moving to operational phase, Starmer says

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      Keir Starmer has called for the “guns to fall silent in Ukraine” and said military powers will meet next week as plans to secure a peace deal move to an “operational phase”.The UK prime minister said Vladimir Putin’s “yes, but” approach to a proposed ceasefire was not good enough, and the Russian president would have to negotiate “sooner or later”.He accused Putin of trying to delay peace, and said it must become a reality after more than three years of war.Starmer was speaking at a press conference in Downing Street after a virtual meeting of the “coalition of the willing”, including the European Commission, European nations, Nato, Canada, Ukraine, Australia and New Zealand on Saturday morning.The meeting was addressed by Starmer, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte.Starmer told journalists: “Sooner or later Putin will have to come to the table. So this is the moment. Let the guns fall silent, let the barbaric attacks on Ukraine once and for all stop, and agree to a ceasefire now.”He added: “Now is the time to engage in discussion on a mechanism to manage and monitor a full ceasefire, and agree to serious negotiations towards not just a pause, but a lasting peace, backed by strong security arrangements through our coalition of the willing.”He said the meeting had led to “new commitments”, including on the wider defence and security of Europe.“We won’t sit back and wait for Putin to act,” he said. “Instead we will keep pushing forward, so the group I convened today is more important than ever.”He added: “We agreed we will keep increasing the pressure on Russia, keep the military aid flowing to Ukraine, and keep tightening the restrictions on Russia’s economy to weaken Putin’s war machine and bring him to the table.“And we agreed to accelerate our practical work to support a potential deal. So we will now move into an operational phase.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOf the military meeting on Thursday, he said it would lead to “strong and robust plans … to swing in behind a peace deal and guarantee Ukraine’s future security”.Starmer had earlier called Ukraine and Zelenskyy the “party of peace”.He said Donald Trump was “absolutely committed to the lasting peace that is needed in Ukraine, and everything he’s doing is geared towards that end”.He told journalists Europe needed to improve its own defence and security, and said the UK was talking to the US on a daily basis about the war.Kyiv has already accepted plans for an immediate 30-day ceasefire but, on Thursday, Putin set out sweeping conditions that he wanted to be met before Russia would agree. They include a guarantee that Ukraine would not rearm or mobilise during the truce.Starmer said: “Volodymyr had committed to a 30-day unconditional ceasefire, but Putin is trying to delay, saying there must be a painstaking study before a ceasefire can take place. Well the world needs action, not a study, not empty words and conditions.”On Saturday, Zelenskyy posted on X that Russian forces were building up along the eastern border of Ukraine, which could signal an attack on the Sumy region.He said: “The buildup of Russian forces indicates that Moscow intends to keep ignoring diplomacy. It is clear that Russia is prolonging the war.”The Ukrainian president said his forces were still fighting in Russia’s Kursk region, and were not facing an encirclement, despite claims by his Russian and US counterparts.Starmer said: “President Trump has offered Putin the way forward to a lasting peace. Now we must make this a reality. So this is the moment to keep driving towards the outcome that we want to see, to end the killing, a just and lasting peace in Ukraine, and lasting security for all of us.” More

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      US official heading Ukraine peace plan has history of empathizing with Russia

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      A retired US general charged with helping sell the Trump administration’s Ukraine peace plan wrote a string of op-eds and reports for a rightwing thinktank in which he repeatedly questioned whether Ukraine had a legitimate part to play in peace negotiations.Keith Kellogg also blamed the war on the machinations of a US “military-industrial complex” and “[Joe] Biden’s national security incompetence” rather than Russia’s 2022 invasion, which has been condemned across the globe and resulted in a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.Kellogg has been seen as a hawk on Russia, but he also wrote that “the US should consider leveraging its military aid to Ukraine to make it contingent on Ukrainian officials agreeing to join peace talks with Russia”. Earlier this month, after a disastrous Washington DC meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on 28 February, US aid to Ukraine was paused, as was intelligence sharing.Kellogg is also surrounded by some key staff who share a rightwing nationalist world view or have links to far-right populist figures.After spending the Biden years at the rightwing and Trumpist America First Policy Institute (AFPI), Kellogg took at least two young AFPI staffers with him to assist him as Trump’s presidential special envoy to Russia and Ukraine.One, Gloria McDonald, is a senior policy adviser to Kellogg after co-authoring several of his AFPI publications, according to her LinkedIn profile. McDonald’s résumé contains no foreign policy experience besides her AFPI policy analyst work and two short Trump-era internships at the US embassy in Kyiv, with her second four-month stint coming after Donald Trump fired then ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.Another ex-AFPI staffer, Zach Bauder, is employed as a special assistant to Kellogg, according to a LinkedIn profile reviewed by the Guardian. He was also a field operative for the chaotic 2022 congressional campaign of the far-right Republican Joe Kent, now Trump’s pick for the National Counterterrorism Center chief.The Guardian sought to confirm their appointments with the state department. In response, a state department spokesperson wrote that they do not comment on personnel. Emails were also sent to Bauder and McDonald’s presumed state department email addresses requesting comment.Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara) documents show that another Kent operative, Matt Braynard, approached Bauder while acting as a lobbyist for the Japanese rightwing populist party Sanseitō, whose leader’s “conspiracist, anti-globalist worldview” has included promoting antisemitic and pro-Russian positions.Braynard’s Fara declaration says that Bauder shared his “interest in meeting with organization leadership”.The revelations about the special envoy’s pro-Russia writings and the far-right connections of his staff come at a time when the Trump administration has been accused of seeking to hand Russia victory in its war at the expense of Ukraine and other European allies, and when the employment of young, ideological staffers across government agencies has drawn scrutiny.However, over the last week Russia has reportedly criticized Kellogg and he was recently excluded from high-level talks on ending the war after Moscow said it didn’t want him involved, NBC News reported. Kellogg was absent from two recent diplomatic summits about the war in Saudi Arabia even though the talks came under his remit.Kellogg’s op-edsKellogg retired from the US army in 2003 as a lieutenant general. He was a prominent figure in the national security hierarchy of the first Trump administration. In 2017 he was the acting national security adviser in the wake of the departure of Michael Flynn. He was chief of staff for the national security council from Trump’s inauguration until April 2018, and then replaced HR McMaster as the national security adviser, a position he held until the inauguration of Joe Biden.From 2021 until his recall into the second Trump administration, Kellogg became the chair of the Center for a New American Security at AFPI, a rightwing thinktank founded after Trump’s defeat by prominent figures in his first administration including the policy adviser Brooke Rollins and economic adviser Larry Kudlow.Described as a “White House in waiting” for Trump’s second term, AFPI has supplied at least 11 Trump cabinet secretaries and agency heads, reportedly more than any other organization.Senior Trump appointments with AFPI ties include the FBI director, Kash Patel, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, and the attorney general, Pam Bondi.At AFPI, Kellogg articulated what he called an “America first” foreign policy. Since 2022, that took the form of increasingly strident criticism of US efforts to assist in the defense of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion.Before the Russian invasion had even commenced, Kellogg wrote that “Ukraine is primarily a European issue to solve”, and empathized with Russia’s point of view: “To Russia, the issue of Ukraine is deeper and more personal. To Russia, it is about their security.”Before the invasion, he urged that Ukraine be “armed to the teeth” as a deterrent, but opposed “a no-fly zone and other ways to engage American military forces in the Ukraine conflict”.After the invasion, Kellogg increasingly reserved his criticisms for the Biden administration, Nato allies and Ukraine, with sympathy withheld from all except Putin and Russia.In June 2022, in a statement co-written with Fred Fleitz, Kellogg wrote of Biden’s announcement of $1.2bn in aid to Ukraine: “This newest call for additional aid is a nonstarter and is not in the best interest of the American people.”View image in fullscreenHis turn against the administration and US allies was most evident from late 2023, including in reports and opinion articles Kellogg wrote with McDonald, then a senior policy analyst at AFPI.McDonald was given the AFPI role with scant previous experience, according to her biography at AFPI’s website, her LinkedIn profile, and information from public records and data brokers.In 2018 and 2019, McDonald did summer internships at the US embassy in Kyiv, per her LinkedIn page. In 2017, she did another internship with a Republican congressman, Dave Brat. Her time at AFPI is the only full-time work experience she takes into her apparent appointment as Kellogg’s most senior adviser in his efforts to implement Trump’s mooted peace deal.In one co-written report, the pair argue that the best course of action for the US is to concede any possibility of Ukraine’s membership in Nato in advance of peace negotiations.“In the case of granting Ukraine NATO membership,” they write, “the US eliminates the very incentive that would bring Russia to the negotiating table. By taking this issue off the table in the near term, however, the US offers an incentive for Russia to join peace talks and agree to an end-state.”They also specifically criticize the Biden administration’s guarantee that Ukraine would be involved in any negotiations.“The Biden Administration’s policy of ‘nothing about Ukraine, without Ukraine’ and arming Ukraine ‘as long as it takes’ has, therefore, only served to remove the urgency of reaching a negotiated end-state to the war.”They further recommend withholding arms from Ukraine in order to force it to the negotiating table: “The US should consider leveraging its military aid to Ukraine to make it contingent on Ukrainian officials agreeing to join peace talks with Russia to negotiate an end state to this conflict.”In a co-written opinion article for the rightwing Washington Times website in December 2023, the pair focused on a recent Zelenskyy visit to the US that included meetings with defense contractors.The pair claimed that this was evidence “our national security policy is being unduly influenced by the interests of the military-industrial complex.”In the piece, they elaborate on this conspiracy narrative about Ukraine and the military-industrial complex: “The US withdrawal from Afghanistan significantly reduced defense contractors’ profits,” they write, adding that “the proxy war in Ukraine, however, not only reignited these defense contracting revenue but also spurred global military spending, which was raised to a historic $2.24 trillion after Russia invaded.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an April 2024 AFPI report written with Fleitz, Kellogg placed the blame for the war largely on Biden, suggesting that his attitude towards Russia was provocative.“Biden’s hostile policy toward Russia not only needlessly made it an enemy of the United States,” they wrote, “but it also drove Russia into the arms of China and led to the development of a new Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis.”They wrote: “It was in America’s best interests to maintain peace with Putin and not provoke and alienate him with aggressive globalist human rights and pro-democracy campaigns or an effort to promote Ukrainian membership in NATO.”They also wrote that Putin’s sabre-rattling at the beginning of 2022 should have induced the US to make a deal, writing: “It was in America’s interest to make a deal with Putin on Ukraine joining NATO, especially by January 2022 when there were signs that a Russian invasion was imminent.”They describe ongoing support of the Ukraine war effort as “expensive virtue signaling and not a constructive policy to promote peace and global stability”.Kellogg and Fleitz appear to recommend that Russia be allowed to keep any territorial gains, arguing that the US should “continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement”.Again, Kellogg signs off on excluding Ukraine from EU membership, writing: “President Biden and other NATO leaders should offer to put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal”.Zach Bauder’s roleAlong with Kellogg and McDonald, the policy adviser, another staffer, Bauder, has come via the AFPI pipeline.And although Bauder has less apparent experience in foreign affairs than even McDonald, he does have international connections that appear related to his 2022 field work for a far-right candidate’s congressional campaign.Bauder – who only graduated from rightwing Hillsdale College last year – is employed as a special assistant to Kellogg, according to his LinkedIn page.Besides internships at AFPI and the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, Bauder’s only work experience besides working as an operations coordinator at AFPI in 2023 was field organizing for the failed 2022 congressional campaign of Kent.The Guardian has previously reported on Kent’s far-right political positions and unanswered questions about his campaign finances and employment.Daily Beast reporting in January 2024 implicated Braynard, a “former top aide” of Kent’s who had “white nationalist ties” in campaign finance issues. A significant proportion of 2022 campaign disbursements went to a company belonging to Braynard’s wife.After being connected with Bauder on Kent’s campaign, Braynard apparently tapped the relationship in his lobbying work for Sanseitō, the far-right populist party in Japan.Fara rules require lobbyists for foreign entities to lodge declarations that specify not only who they are working for, and how much they are paying, but who they make contact with in the course of pursuing their client’s aims.A September 2024 Fara filing from Braynard indicates that he had worked as a paid lobbyist for Sanseitō.Rob Fahey is an assistant professor in the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study in Shinjuku, Japan, who has written some of the scarce English language research on the far-right party.In a telephone conversation, he said the party had grown out of “the anti-vaccine, anti-masking social movement” touched off in Japan by the Covid-19 pandemic. He said that party members were “terminally online, and they are very, very deeply involved in the conspiracy framework that is a core part of the Maga movement as well”.Fahey said Sanseitō was part of the “new conspiratorial hard right in Japan” whose “media diet comes from the American conspiratorial ecosystem”.Fahey added that Sanseitō largely “see the war in Ukraine as through the same lens as American conspiracy theorists: it’s Nato’s fault, and Nato is part of the new world order”.Braynard’s filing says that the aim of his lobbying for the group is for them to “win Japanese elections”.On Braynard’s account in the Fara declaration, “the principal, party leader Sohei Kamiya, had planned a trip to the US”.He continues: “The principal was interested in appearing on Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson’s podcast, so I texted the producers of those shows. I also contacted Americans for Tax Reform, Heritage Foundation, and America First Policy Center to ask if they would be interested in meeting with the principal to discuss common, populist conservative policies.”In his list of the people he contacted, along with producers for Carlson and Bannon and a Heritage Foundation staffer, Braynard lists Bauder.The filing said he texted Bauder, described as “formerly and then again more recently staff of America First Policy Institute, but not employed by them at the time I contacted him”.Following the Oval Office meltdown with Zelenskyy, it has seemed that Trump himself has been calling the shots on a cooling relationship with Ukraine and the other western allies. But he apparently still has the support of his special envoy.This week, the Guardian reported that Kellogg told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting of the suspension of intelligence sharing that “they brought it on themselves, the Ukrainians,” and that it was a punishment akin to “hitting a mule with a two-by-four across the nose”. More