Mindy Haas

Who Are the Federal Forces Behind Trump’s Mass Deportations and Crime Crackdown? (Gift Article) As President Trump deploys ICE, Border Patrol, the National Guard and other forces to U.S. cities, here’s how to tell them apart — and what their powers are.

Gift link. (I object to the New York Times calling this a "crime crackdown." The Trump regime is bringing violence to my city, Chicago, not fighting violence.)

My survey experiment from 2017 & 2023 ➡️ information on customary international law significantly decreases support for potentially violative uses of force, especially paired with statements that IOs have found similar behavior violations. Decrease in support partially mediated by morality concerns.

For those of you not attending the No Kings march in DC today, come see our IS-ISSS panel on domestic politics and public opinion!

The Vanishing Act: How Assad’s Top Henchmen Fled Syria, and Justice

Modern-day rat lines! And that much harder for the ICC (or others) to seek justice.

The Vanishing Act: How Assad’s Top Henchmen Fled Syria, and Justice www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/w...

The Palestine Branch: A den of torture in Assad’s Syria Branch 235, also known as the Palestine Branch, was one of the most notorious prisons run by the Syrian military intelligence services during the Assad era. Located on the outskirts of Damascus, its…

The Palestine Branch: A den of torture in Assad’s Syria

The prison’s labyrinthian underground chambers have yet to reveal all their secrets, which are critical for bringing justice and Syria’s future stability.

www.france24.com/en/middle-ea...

Jervis Forum Roundtable 17-5 on Gioe and Morell, “Spy and Tell” Roundtable Review 17-5 David V. Gioe and Michael J. Morell, “Spy and Tell: The Promise and Peril of Disclosing Intelligence for Strategic Advantage,” Foreign Affairs 7:4 (2024): 138-152.

Should the US release secret intelligence for strategic gain? A roundtable debate in @h-diplo.bsky.social with Melissa Graves, David Gioe, @mindyhaas.bsky.social and me: issforum.org/roundtables/...

Excited to see Covert Action: National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention, in the wild at #APSA2025. My contribution: Israel's Mossad and Covert Action: Immigration, Counter-Proliferation, and Assassination. Edited by @rorycormac.bsky.social @magslong.bsky.social @markstout.bsky.social

Anyone have a free Saturday afternoon in Vancouver? Come to my panel, Overt and Covert Interference in World Affairs, at 4pm in VCC West 215! Also featuring Alex Downes, Rob Schub, and five amazing papers on foreign interference.

153. Living by the Ipse Dixit A constitutional principle like the "unitary executive theory" isn't worth all that much if the Supreme Court can conjure new, unprincipled exceptions to it by simply asserting that they exist.

“If the unitary executive theory is subject to exceptions for contexts in which the practical consequences of eliminating an agency’s independence would be too extreme, then it’s not much of a theory.”

Today’s “One First” on #SCOTUS’s deeply flawed ruling last Thursday in Trump v. Wilcox:

The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site The site, starwarsweb.net, was a covert CIA communications tool. It has pictures of Yoda and C-3PO on it.

New from 404 Media: the CIA secretly ran a Star Wars fan website. Was part of the network of sites the CIA used to communicate with sources. Iran discovered the network, imprisoned people. Later dozens died in China after exposed www.404media.co/the-cia-secr...

H-Net announcement here: networks.h-net.org/group/discus...

Announcement from Columbia's History Lab: 🗄️ HistoryLab AI 📁 history-lab.ramus.network 🗃️allows natural-language queries of over more than 5 million primary source records -- CIA files, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes, and State Department cables.

Forthcoming volume in December with @lucatrenta.bsky.social

www.rienner.com/title/Killin...

A cover graphic with the title Know Your Rights: Expedited Removal Expansion and Conozca Sus Derechos: Ampliación de la Deportación Acelerada

*New English & Spanish #KYR*

DHS has expanded its use of the 'expedited removal' process. Undocumented community members are now at greater risk of being put in a rapid deportation process - without the right to appear in front of an immigration judge.

What changed & how people can prepare 🧵

Leaked: Palantir’s Plan to Help ICE Deport People Internal Palantir Slack chats and message boards obtained by 404 Media show the contracting giant is helping find the location of people flagged for deportation, that Palantir is now a “more mature pa...

New from 404 Media: we've obtained a leak from inside Palantir describing Palantir's plan to help ICE find people to deport. Includes peoples' location. Palantir is expecting a backlash, preparing comments for employees to tell their family. Says ICE "mature partner"

www.404media.co/leaked-palan...

Had a wonderful time learning and connecting with fellow scholars about current world issues and how we can educate our students about them, with the help of @cfr.org and their educational resources!

How Trump’s Tariffs Fit the Autocrat’s Playbook The President thrives on confrontation and demands supplication. Politicizing the economy creates opportunities for both.

New Q&A: I talked to the political scientist Jan-Werner Muller about whether Trump is less rational than other authoritarians, the historical relationship between far-right leaders & big-business, & whether it’s condescending to absolve Trump’s voters. www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.

American war planning usually takes place in highly secure facilities. But the Trump administration planned its strikes on the Houthis using a group chat—and accidentally included The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. theatln.tc/IuULQFiY

My initial deep dive into the "shocking" new JFK Assassination files. open.substack.com/pub/thebrush...

#JFKRelease

What Does Trump See in Putin? A Conversation With Fiona Hill

On the latest episode of “The Foreign Affairs Interview,” Fiona Hill discusses Donald Trump’s admiration for Vladimir Putin—and why his push for warmer relations with Moscow is raising alarms across European capitals:

NARRATOR: The U.S. economy is not being repaired or restored. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/short-term...

QAnon Hasn’t Disappeared. It’s in America’s Bloodstream. The QAnon conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was fighting a satanic pedophile cabal may have faded from national discourse, but its ideology, networks, and practices have become integrated into…

The QAnon conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was fighting a satanic pedophile cabal may have faded from national discourse, but its ideology, networks, and practices have become integrated into American politics, reports Julian Feeld for Jacobin.

Exactly, essentially someone who lacks individuality or critical thinking. An insult, for sure.

Why do states choose covert action? This article proposes a narrative-based approach to understanding why states choose covert action. Drawing on narratology and securitisation theory, it argues that states employ covert action to sh...

New article published in journal Intelligence and National Security titled "Why Do States Choose Covert Action?" by Jack Duffield, with details here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The Anwar al-Awlaki File, Explained Update - February 14, 2025Washington, D.C., February 14, 2025 - Some 14 years after Anwar al-Awlaki's death in an American drone strike, the Al Qaeda terrorist has become the unlikely subject of a flu...

The Anwar al-Awlaki File, Explained
nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-boo...

Do advisers affect foreign policy and, if so, how? Recent scholarship on elite decision making prioritizes leaders and the institutions that surround them, rather than the dispositions of advisers themselves. We argue that despite the hierarchical nature of foreign policy decision making, advisers’ predispositions regarding the use of force shape state behavior through the counsel advisers provide in deliberations. To test our argument, we introduce an original data set of 2,685 foreign policy deliberations between US presidents and their advisers from 1947 to 1988. Applying a novel machine learning approach to estimate the hawkishness of 1,134 Cold War–era foreign policy decision makers, we show that adviser-level hawkishness affects both the counsel that advisers provide in deliberations and the decisions leaders make: conflictual policy choices grow more likely as hawks increasingly dominate the debate, even when accounting for leader dispositions...

New in @iojournal.bsky.social w Jost @ericmin.bsky.social & Schub:

We combine computational methods with uniquely rich Cold War archival evidence to study how advisers matter in foreign policy.

Where advisers stand doesn't just depend on where they sit.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

polisky

Now on #FirstView: Racial Tropes in the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy: A Computational Text Analysis, by @carsonaust.bsky.social, @ericmin.bsky.social and Maya Van Nuys.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The President’s Kill List: Assassination and US Foreign Policy since 1945 Published in The RUSI Journal (Vol. 170, No. 1, 2025)

50 free e-prints of the review available here: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/WFFYI...

The President’s Kill List: Assassination and US Foreign Policy since 1945 Published in The RUSI Journal (Vol. 170, No. 1, 2025)

I reviewed @lucatrenta.bsky.social excellent book, The President's Kill List, for RUSI: doi.org/10.1080/0307... I loved it, in part, b/c it acknowledges the cognitive dissonance btw a formal ban on assassination and policies that permit killing foreign officials for political gain. Go read it!

So happy to have shared my research on state-sponsored assassination with @lucatrenta.bsky.social, @avramovok.bsky.social, and Arturo Jiminez-Bacardi at the @socintelhist.bsky.social 2025 Conference at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. A perfect location for studying intel history!