GlacialTurtle

On Tuesday, Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli stood at a press conference. The federal government, he announced, would “aggressively” pursue anyone who attacks capitalism, “our way of life, our system, which provides the best goods and services to the most people.” He was explaining why Chamel Abdulkarim, a 29-year-old warehouse worker from Ontario, California, faces federal arson charges carrying a potential life sentence.

Doctrine, not rhetoric.

According to the criminal complaint filed April 9th, Abdulkarim set fire to a Kimberly-Clark distribution centre in the early hours of April 7th, filming himself as he did it and posting the video to Instagram. The 1.2 million square foot facility burned to the ground. Estimated damage: $500 million. Eighteen co-workers evacuated safely. Abdulkarim walked two miles down the road, raised his hands when police approached, and said he was confessing. He had already texted his explanation to a co-worker:

“All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Pay us more of the value WE bring. Not corporate. Didn’t see the shareholders picking up a shift.”

What Abdulkarim thought he was doing, and why, is not ambiguous. The question is what the state’s response tells us about the political moment we are actually in.

[...]

Abdulkarim’s politics, such as they were, had no organisational form behind them. No union called this action. No collective demand was attached to it. He texted his co-worker at 1:33 in the morning and walked away alone. Sitting with that image long enough, you recognise something specific: this is what political fury looks like when the organisations that might have caught it and given it direction have been hollowed out over forty years of defeats. The Mangione reference confirms it. Mangione also acted alone, also articulated a coherent class analysis, also had no movement at his back. What both men represent is not an insurgency but an isolation, or what the Trotskyist tradition would call substitutionism, individuals substituting individual action for the collective agency that does not yet exist. That is a real political problem. It is not the problem Essayli was identifying.

Because what NSPM-7 does, and what this prosecution will do, is treat the sentiment as the threat rather than the symptom. Millions of people in the United States work six-day weeks for wages that do not cover rent. The Iran war has pushed fuel costs to levels that make the arithmetic of ordinary life impossible for a significant portion of the workforce. These are the conditions that produced Abdulkarim’s fury, and they will produce more of it, with or without an Instagram account. The security apparatus has decided that the correct response is to build a legal framework that criminalises the political expression of that fury, designating class consciousness itself as a terrorism indicator.

Essayli called capitalism “our way of life.” He meant it as defence. He was also, without intending to, providing the most precise description of what is actually at stake. The system is not being protected from a threat external to it. It is protecting itself from the people it depends on to function.

The UK flew a drone over Baalbek, Lebanon as Israel massacred 18 people and injured 28 others there on Wednesday, flight data shows.

The flight, first reported on by independent journalist Matt Kennard, left the RAF Akrotiri airbase in Cyprus at 8:22am local time, just hours before Israel’s massive and intense bombardment of civilian areas across Lebanon, which killed at least 303 people, including many children.

The General Atomics Protector RG1 drone circled in the sky near Baalbek for hours, data from AirNav Radar shows. The model is equipped with missiles and bombs and can be used for “surveillance, search and rescue, and armed operations”, according to the RAF’s website.

Prime minister Keir Starmer has repeatedly, and falsely, claimed that the UK’s only involvement in the war in the Middle East since 28 February is defensive.

Wednesday’s drone flight appears to mirror a pattern first seen at the height of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, when Starmer’s government flew numerous surveillance flights over the enclave on behalf of the apartheid state.

Those flights led many observers to conclude that he was directly complicit in the atrocities in Gaza.

Wednesday’s attacks on Lebanon violated a ceasefire agreement reached just hours earlier between the US and Iran and prompted accusations of state-led terror by Israel.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention updated its Red Flag alert for Lebanon after the killings. The alerts serve as warnings for potential genocide in a given region.

“Today’s attacks on Lebanon were a clear atrocity crime no matter how Israel tries to justify it,” the institute said on Wednesday.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44654269

What do economics students learn – beyond models and methods?

This new study examines how economics education shapes students’ beliefs, biases, and openness to competing ideas. Drawing on a large randomised controlled experiment with economics students across 10 countries, the authors investigate how exposure to different framings and forms of “authority” in economics can influence students’ confidence, conformity, and willingness to engage critically with alternative perspectives.

The findings point to a deeper challenge facing economics education today: when mainstream authority is privileged and the discipline is taught as singular, neutral, and closed to contestation, students can be steered toward ideological narrowness – and away from critical inquiry, debate, and pluralism.

Excerpts from the report:

Educational processes in economics— including curricula, pedagogies, disciplinary norms, and broader mechanisms of academic socialization—play a central role in reproducing and legitimizing the field’s narrow intellectual boundaries. Drawing on a novel randomized controlled experiment involving 2,735 economics students across 10 countries, this study provides systematic empirical evidence of how students are conditioned to internalize the ideological and authority frameworks embedded in mainstream economics. We show that economics education does more than simply excluding alternative perspectives: it conditions students to associate credibility not with the substance of an idea, but with the perceived authority and ideological alignment of its source, often unconsciously. This conditioning normalizes and naturalizes a narrow “economics” mindset, fosters deference over critical inquiry, marginalizes alternative perspectives, and reinforces the illusion of neutrality and value-freeness at the heart of the discipline.

The role of ideology in economics has long been the subject of critical debate. A central contention in this literature is that mainstream economics, though often portrayed as objective and ideology-free, is shaped by powerful yet concealed ideological underpinnings, interpretive frameworks, and institutional practices4 (e.g., Avsar, 2011; Chang, 2014; Fine & Milonakis, 2009; Fullbrook, 2008; Galbraith, 1989; Javdani & Chang, 2023; Krugman, 2009; Kvangraven & Kesar, 2023; Rodrik, 2015; Romer, 2015; Stiglitz, 2002; Thompson, 1997). By monopolizing the terms of inquiry through a monolithic ideological apparatus, mainstream economics systematically marginalizes competing perspectives—such as feminist, ecological, Post-Keynesian, Marxist, and (old) institutional economics—that emphasize the broader economic, social, and environmental consequences of market-centric thinking rooted in a naturalized view of the market.

[...]

By providing systematic empirical evidence that exposes the mechanisms of ideological conformity, deference to authority, and the exclusion of alternative perspectives within economics education, we move beyond abstract critique—important as that remains— to reveal how ideology is operationalized and reproduced in practice. In doing so, we contribute to growing debates, both within the discipline and in broader public and policy arenas, calling for a more pluralistic, reflexive, and socially responsive economics (e.g., Carthcart & Nelson, 2024; Cœuré, 2014; Dow, 2017; Falk & Andre, 2021; Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2017; Katsomitro & Writer, 2024; The Guardian, 2024; Wolf, 2019).

Our findings provide compelling evidence that students’ evaluations of economic ideas are significantly biased by the ideological orientation and mainstream status of the sources to which those ideas are attributed. Specifically, when a statement’s attribution is switched from a mainstream to a non-mainstream source, or removed entirely, students’ agreement with the content declines substantially. This pattern suggests that rather than engaging critically with the substance of arguments, students rely heavily on perceived authority and ideological alignment to assess validity. Notably, this tendency persists even though 67 percent of students claim that they evaluate ideas based on content alone. The effects are especially pronounced among PhD students—nearly twice as large—indicating a deepening of ideological conformity associated with prolonged exposure to mainstream economics, as well as self-selection mechanisms that reinforce conformity by filtering out those who fail to adopt the dominant posture—what it means to “think like an economist.”

What do economics students learn – beyond models and methods?

This new study examines how economics education shapes students’ beliefs, biases, and openness to competing ideas. Drawing on a large randomised controlled experiment with economics students across 10 countries, the authors investigate how exposure to different framings and forms of “authority” in economics can influence students’ confidence, conformity, and willingness to engage critically with alternative perspectives.

The findings point to a deeper challenge facing economics education today: when mainstream authority is privileged and the discipline is taught as singular, neutral, and closed to contestation, students can be steered toward ideological narrowness – and away from critical inquiry, debate, and pluralism.

Excerpts from the report:

Educational processes in economics— including curricula, pedagogies, disciplinary norms, and broader mechanisms of academic socialization—play a central role in reproducing and legitimizing the field’s narrow intellectual boundaries. Drawing on a novel randomized controlled experiment involving 2,735 economics students across 10 countries, this study provides systematic empirical evidence of how students are conditioned to internalize the ideological and authority frameworks embedded in mainstream economics. We show that economics education does more than simply excluding alternative perspectives: it conditions students to associate credibility not with the substance of an idea, but with the perceived authority and ideological alignment of its source, often unconsciously. This conditioning normalizes and naturalizes a narrow “economics” mindset, fosters deference over critical inquiry, marginalizes alternative perspectives, and reinforces the illusion of neutrality and value-freeness at the heart of the discipline.

The role of ideology in economics has long been the subject of critical debate. A central contention in this literature is that mainstream economics, though often portrayed as objective and ideology-free, is shaped by powerful yet concealed ideological underpinnings, interpretive frameworks, and institutional practices4 (e.g., Avsar, 2011; Chang, 2014; Fine & Milonakis, 2009; Fullbrook, 2008; Galbraith, 1989; Javdani & Chang, 2023; Krugman, 2009; Kvangraven & Kesar, 2023; Rodrik, 2015; Romer, 2015; Stiglitz, 2002; Thompson, 1997). By monopolizing the terms of inquiry through a monolithic ideological apparatus, mainstream economics systematically marginalizes competing perspectives—such as feminist, ecological, Post-Keynesian, Marxist, and (old) institutional economics—that emphasize the broader economic, social, and environmental consequences of market-centric thinking rooted in a naturalized view of the market.

[...]

By providing systematic empirical evidence that exposes the mechanisms of ideological conformity, deference to authority, and the exclusion of alternative perspectives within economics education, we move beyond abstract critique—important as that remains— to reveal how ideology is operationalized and reproduced in practice. In doing so, we contribute to growing debates, both within the discipline and in broader public and policy arenas, calling for a more pluralistic, reflexive, and socially responsive economics (e.g., Carthcart & Nelson, 2024; Cœuré, 2014; Dow, 2017; Falk & Andre, 2021; Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2017; Katsomitro & Writer, 2024; The Guardian, 2024; Wolf, 2019).

Our findings provide compelling evidence that students’ evaluations of economic ideas are significantly biased by the ideological orientation and mainstream status of the sources to which those ideas are attributed. Specifically, when a statement’s attribution is switched from a mainstream to a non-mainstream source, or removed entirely, students’ agreement with the content declines substantially. This pattern suggests that rather than engaging critically with the substance of arguments, students rely heavily on perceived authority and ideological alignment to assess validity. Notably, this tendency persists even though 67 percent of students claim that they evaluate ideas based on content alone. The effects are especially pronounced among PhD students—nearly twice as large—indicating a deepening of ideological conformity associated with prolonged exposure to mainstream economics, as well as self-selection mechanisms that reinforce conformity by filtering out those who fail to adopt the dominant posture—what it means to “think like an economist.”

Frensic.

A multibillion-pound drive to “mainline AI into the veins” of the British economy is riddled with “phantom investments” and shaky accounting, a Guardian investigation has found.

[...]

On Monday, former UK deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg and former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg were announced as new board members at one of the firms, NScale. Nscale also said it had raised a $2bn funding round, sending its valuation soaring to $14.6bn.

But a Guardian investigation has shown the money isn’t necessarily real, the datacentres may not be new, the jobs are unaccounted for – and the supercomputer site 12 miles north of London is still a scaffolding yard.

[...]

In one case, it said that there was no contract in place for a £1.9bn ($2.5bn) investment despite a press release declaring that one had been signed. In another, it said that it was “not playing an active role in auditing these commitments”.

The findings raise questions about a series of massive AI investments announced globally in the past year, many in high-level press releases from governments and tech companies.

[...]

CoreWeave said the investment would “create job opportunities” and herald further expansion. Six months later, it announced that the two datacentres were operational: one in London Docklands, and one in Crawley near Gatwick.

Planning records indicate that CoreWeave built no new datacentres at either location during that time period. Neither did the two partners mentioned in its press release.

In fact, while CoreWeave’s – and the government’s – communications imply that physical buildings were built by suggesting the investment would bring “two new data centres to our shores”, this was misleading.

The Guardian understands that CoreWeave became a customer of two existing datacentres, one built in 2002 and one built in 2015, both of which lease space to a host of other companies, including Google and Fujitsu. CoreWeave rented space in these datacentres, and deployed Nvidia chips that it had paid for.

Effectively, its investment amounts to the relocation into the UK of computer chips manufactured in Taiwan by a US company.

There is no indication in public-facing materials that CoreWeave has made other investments, beyond renting an office in a building in Southwark, London, which it has called its “European headquarters.”

Rikap said it was “very common” for datacentre developers to frame the purchase of equipment, or the acquisition of other companies, as investment. “The rules are very flexible and help them to make these big claims and investments that a government like Starmer’s, which is desperate for good news, can use for their favour.”

In a response to a query from the Guardian, the government said that the figures it had announced for CoreWeave’s investment did not come from them. A statement said they were produced by CoreWeave.

It did not say whether this investment amounted to capital or equipment.

The think tank that made Keir Starmer paid private investigators at APCO to dig up dirt on reporters who had exposed at least £730,000 in undeclared funding for Labour Together: cash that was used to fuel the prime minister’s rise to power.

Our reporting on this scandal has made headlines across the media and has now triggered an inquiry by the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team.

So what’s the problem? Surely this means we’ll finally get to the bottom of Labour Together’s black ops campaign? We’re not so confident.

For a start, it’s an ‘informal inquiry’, not a full investigation. And Josh Simons - the former Labour Together chief who commissioned the PR firm - is now a minister… in the Cabinet Office.

But the ties between Labour Together and the department that is supposed to be “establishing the facts” stretch well beyond Simons’ ministerial brief.

Democracy for Sale can today report that Labour Together and its directors have donated more than £150,000 to sitting Cabinet Office ministers.

The donations include £57,400 and £35,500 respectively to key Starmer allies Darren Jones and Nick Thomas-Symonds ahead of the 2024 general election.

Cabinet Office boss Jones is now responsible for propriety and ethics, while Thomas-Symonds’ remit includes inquiries policy.

Another Cabinet Office minister, Anna Turley, received £10,000 from Labour Together and £10,000 from think tank director Fran Perrin in 2024. Simons himself has received £40,000 from Perrin and £5,000 from another Labour Together board member, Mike Craven, since the start of 2024.

Separately, a former Labour Together director now holds a senior role in the same Cabinet Office unit that is charged with running the government’s probe into Simons.

[...]

Labour Together’s ties to the Cabinet Office run deep. The £35,500 donation that Thomas-Symonds received was to second one of the think tank’s staffers Jess Sargeant to his office, while in opposition.

After Labour’s election win, Sargeant joined the Cabinet Office as a deputy director in the Propriety, Ethics and Constitution Group, sparking accusations of ‘cronyism’ given her former role at Labour Together, where she worked under Simons.

Notably, her LinkedIn omits Labour Together, listing her as “director of constitutional change” at an unnamed think tank.

The wife of Keir Starmer’s comms chief had direct knowledge of Labour Together’s controversial investigation into journalists and their sources, documents seen by Democracy for Sale reveal.

Kate Forrester, a former Labour party advisor, ran the PR firm APCO Worldwide’s London Office in 2023 when it was hired by Labour Together to dig dirt on journalists from the Sunday Times and other outlets. She also sat on the Starmerite think tank’s advisory board.

The controversial investigation was commissioned by Josh Simons who was Labour Together’s director, and is now a minister in Keir Starmer’s government.

Simons has continually refused to answer questions about why he paid a PR firm to dig dirt on reporters investigating Labour Together’s failure to declare £730,000 in donations. That money was used to support Starmer’s successful leadership campaign.

Forrester is married to Paul Ovenden, who was Starmer’s head of communications at the time of Labour Together’s investigation. Ovenden resigned from government last year after explicit text messages he had sent about veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott came to light.

[...]

Simons has also said on Twitter that claims that APCO was asked to investigate journalists are “nonsense.”

But a copy of APCO’s contract with Labour Together, seen by Democracy for Sale, states that the PR firm “will investigate the sourcing, funding and origins of a Sunday Times article about Labour Together, as well as upcoming works by authors Paul Holden and Matt Taibbi.” Holden and Taibbi have both written critically about Labour Together.

The contract, worth at least £30,000, goes on to say that APCO’s “approach should provide a body of evidence that could be packaged up for us in the media in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together.”

Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, was aware of APCO’s investigation into journalists during his time running Labour Together. McSweeney resigned last weekend.

Forrester joined Labour Together as an adviser in October 2023, a month before APCO was hired. At the time, Politico reported that the think tank had added “a swathe of heavy-hitters” to its advisory board, including “APCO public affairs bod Kate Forrester”. Forrester said she never attended an advisory board meeting.

After the US cut off diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961, the British embassy in Havana functioned as a proxy for US covert action and intelligence gathering against Castro’s government.

British operations, undertaken by the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), were designed to delegitimise Cuba’s promotion of wealth distribution and to support US attempts to overthrow Castro.

The IRD, a cold war propaganda unit, sought to censure key Cuban officials and even plotted to spread homophobic rumours about Fidel’s second in command and brother, Raúl Castro.

Newly-released British files also show that during the 1970s, the IRD produced forged documents in an attempt to attack Cuba’s anti-apartheid campaigns in Africa.

[...]

While the US effort to overthrow Castro is infamous, very little is known about British operations in Cuba.

In August 1962, Leslie Boas, Britain’s regional information officer for Latin America based in Caracas, Venezuela, circulated a report on the leading political personalities in Cuba. “Having read the report”, Boas noted, “it has occurred to me that we could make effective use of some of the information it contains for propaganda purposes”.

He continued: “We could put out, in a completely unattributable fashion, a leaflet entitled ‘Personalities of the Cuban Revolution’ in which the more dubious aspects of the leading figures in the Cuban scene would be highlighted”.

The IRD was asked to “do some research” in order to produce additional “ammunition” on Castro’s aides.

To this end, senior IRD official Rosemary Allott suggested the unit “might include suitable stories circulating in Cuba (I heard one in Havana – since forgotten – on Raul Castro as a homosexual). In fact we might ask Havana for other purposes to send us all counter-revolutionary jokes and stories”.

[...]

In March 1962, shortly after the US initiated Operation Mongoose, a British embassy official in Washington wrote to the Foreign Office in London about a meeting with the US State Department and “our Friends”, a reference to the CIA.

“They would… be very grateful for facts on what is going on in Cuba which they can use in their propaganda and any suggestions the Embassy in Havana may have on useful topics and themes”, the British embassy official noted.

In a document marked Top Secret, Foreign Office official Robert Marrett noted that: “It seems to me to be a sound idea that our Embassy in Cuba should also assist the Americans discreetly by supplying anti-Castro material”.

By June 1962, an operation to send “useful items to the Americans for propaganda purposes” had been “approved by the Foreign Office”.

More than 2,000 Britons served in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) during the Gaza genocide, it can be revealed.

The information was obtained by Declassified via a Freedom of Information request issued to the IDF by lawyer Elad Man from the NGO Hatzlacha.

The data outlines the number of people with dual and multiple nationalities who were IDF service members as of March 2025.

It shows how 1,686 British-Israelis and a further 383 people with British, Israeli, and another nationality served in the IDF amid the annihilation of Gaza.

They were among over 50,000 IDF soldiers with Israeli and at least one other nationality.

The largest cohorts come from the US, Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany.

Prior to this, data was only available on the number of Britons without Israeli citizenship serving in the IDF, so-called lone soldiers, a figure that was as low as 54. The revelation that far more UK passport holders served in the IDF will raise serious legal questions for the British authorities, which have thus far failed to prosecute any citizens returning home after fighting in Gaza.

Paul Heron, a lawyer with the Public Interest Law Centre (PILC), told Declassified: “There must be no impunity where credible evidence links British nationals to grave breaches of international law.

“The UK has clear duties to prevent genocide and avoid assisting unlawful military action.

“Where dual nationals have served in units implicated in atrocities, the authorities must investigate promptly and, where the evidence meets the threshold, pursue arrest and prosecution like any other serious crime”.

Declassified contributor Hamza Yusuf previously exposed how Britons were serving in some of Israel’s “craziest” combat units in Gaza where they viewed Palestinian fighters as “rats” and “animals”. Among the Britons identified by Yusuf was Levi Simon, who was seen “rummaging through the underwear drawers of Palestinian women forced to flee their homes” in Gaza.

Another was master sergeant Sam Sank from London, who filmed himself fighting in Gaza between December 2023 and January 2024. Sank had told The Times that “based on the number of his friends in the IDF, which includes a Scot in his own small unit, [he] believes there are hundreds, if not thousands, more Britons fighting in Israel.” His estimates match with the data Hatzlacha has now obtained from Israeli authorities.

On Friday, I testified in front of Governor J.B. Pritzker’s “Illinois Accountability Commission,” the state government body he set up after the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” attack on Chicago last summer and the precursor of the even larger federal occupation of Minneapolis that we’re experiencing now. The body’s goal is to both document what happened to Chicago, with an eye on future prosecutions, understand the role of various Trump officials in this federal occupation, and offer recommendations about how to fix immigration enforcement going forward.

I was called as the commission’s expert witness on the history of problems, corruption, and training within CBP and ICE — a story I’ve covered for more than a dozen years, as regular readers of this newsletter know. To prepare, I spent the last week re-reading and re-familiarizing myself with DHS scandals and waves of corruption and mismanagement — and found myself horrified anew.

[...]

As I told the commission, “US law enforcement has never experienced a scandal as big, as far-reaching, destructive, and as far-lasting as the wave of corruption and criminality that has overtaken CBP and the Border Patrol since 2005. It’s a story that too much of the public still doesn’t know and too many policymakers still don’t understand.”

From the testimony given to the hearing:

What I hope you will take away from my testimony today is that the problems, abuses, scandals, and controversies involving CBP and ICE that have been on display over the last year in far too many American cities and social media feeds — from deadly shootings and agent brutality to the routine abuse of Constitutional and civil rights and liberties — is entirely consistent with long-identified problems in CBP and ICE that have gone ignored and uncorrected both by a generation of Congress and multiple Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

These are not aberrations — these incidents are the entirely foreseeable consequence of specific funding and management decisions and how the nation has approached immigration enforcement since 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

In particular, CBP has been likely the deadliest and certainly the most troubled federal law enforcement agency for the better part of two decades now. Since 9/11, the culture of ICE and CBP has meant that the agencies have been what you might call a fascist-secret-police-in-waiting, troubled agencies simply waiting for an ambitious would-be authoritarian.

Video of the statement can also be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/live/Cu7uMFfFpIk?t=1995

U.S. Agency for International Development staffers in early 2024 drafted a warning to senior officials in Joe Biden’s administration: Northern Gaza had turned into an “Apocalyptic Wasteland” with dire shortages of food and medical aid.

Three months after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel's incursion into the Gaza Strip, the internal message laid out in gruesome detail scenes observed by United Nations staff who visited the area on a two-part humanitarian fact-finding mission in January and February.

The staff reported seeing a human femur and other bones on the roads, dead bodies abandoned in cars and “catastrophic human needs, particularly for food and safe drinking water.”

But the U.S. ambassador to Jerusalem, Jack Lew, and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked the cable from wider distribution within the United States government because they believed it lacked balance, according to interviews with four former officials and documents seen by Reuters.

[...]

Reuters saw one of those cables. The other four, also blocked by Lew and Hallett because of their concerns about balance, were described by four former officials.

Three former U.S. officials said that the descriptions were unusually graphic and would have commanded the attention of senior U.S. officials had the message been widely circulated within Joe Biden’s administration.

It would have also deepened scrutiny of a National Security Memorandum, issued by Biden that month, which conditioned the supply of U.S. intelligence and weapons on Israel’s compliance with international law, they said.

"While cables weren't the only means of providing humanitarian information ... they would have represented an acknowledgement by the ambassador of the reality of the situation in Gaza,” said Andrew Hall, then a crisis operations specialist for USAID.

The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem oversaw the language and distribution of most of the cables about Gaza, including those from other embassies in the region.

One former senior official said Lew and Hallett often told USAID leadership that the cables included information that had been widely reported in the media.

Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and representatives for former President Joe Biden did not respond to requests for comment about the fact that the cables never reached upper leadership of the U.S. government.