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Swissinfo podcasts. This is INSIDE Geneva. I'm your host, Imogen folks, and this is a production from swissinfo, the international public media company of Switzerland. In today's program, the people who so
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recklessly tore down the agency and put so many lives at risk around the world are still sitting in high positions of government and have not been held accountable for their actions. And so I, I intentionally name names in the book and describe exactly who is responsible and why.
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Do you think that it's possible Israel killed 20,000 children, at least that's the official number, that no one disputes. 20,000 children over two years and never once committed a massacre or slaughter. Does that feel statistically likely to you? I think the answer is, is on its face, no.
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Hello and welcome again to INSIDE Geneva. And in today's program, we bring you the latest in our occasional books to make you think series. We'll take you behind the scenes during the dismantling of the United States Aid and Development Department, USAID with a book. A former staff member who saw the consequences of Elon Musk's famous wood chipper
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close up the idea that USAID was destroyed because it was wasteful or because it wasn't working or for any of the other reasons that you're hearing now. It was destroyed by people who really had no idea what they were doing and because of the vindictive ego of Elon Musk.
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And we'll bring you a forensic analysis of how the media, in this case the US Media, covered the war in Gaza. Did the language journalists used make the violence somehow more normal and more acceptable?
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The New York Times referred to the killing of Israelis on October 7th as a massacre 124 times and a slaughter 53 times. And they referred in the same timeframe to the killing of Palestinians, despite the fact in the first 100 days the killing was seven or eight times more than October 7th. They used similar language. 0 times 0. Not once did they refer to anything Israel did to Palestinians in the first 100 days as a massacre or a slaughter.
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That was Adam Johnson, whose book how to Sell a Genocide has caused a lot of soul searching among the US Media. But first, let's hear from Nicholas Enrich, author of into the Woodchipper, a whistleblower's account of how the Trump administration shredded usaid. As President Donald Trump began his second term in office in early 2025, Enrich was still at work at USAID.
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I was the acting assistant administrator for global health at the U.S. agency for International Development, USAID. In January 25, as the agency was dismantled by the Trump administration, since then have written a book called into the Woodchipper, a whistleblower's account of how the Trump administration shredded usaid.
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I find it very interesting, observing the United States, that you went ahead and did this because this must have been traumatic for you and your colleagues. And some people might have said, I just need to get away. I've got a young family. I need to get away and recover from this.
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Yeah, I mean, there was definitely an urge to do this and to just move past, but for me, there were several reasons that I felt that I really needed to do this. Mostly, I, I think my primary motivation was the potential of accountability because the people who so recklessly tore down the agency and put so many lives at risk around the world are still sitting in high positions of government and have not been held accountable for their actions. And so I, I intentionally name names in the book and describe exactly who is responsible and why. But I also wanted to kind of raise this as a warning at a time when this was a congressionally established federal agency with broad bipartisan support that was able. Destroyed in a matter of weeks by people who didn't even understand what the agency did and couldn't care less about the costs. It was able to be torn down that easily because people did not stand up and speak out against what was happening. So I also hope this book is a bit of a call to action for people who are seeing that something is maybe fundamentally breaking in American democracy and trying to recognize when is the right time to stand up and say this is not okay.
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You have raised there half a dozen different points that I want to dig deeper into during this interview. But you said the people who came along to destroy it didn't really know anything about usaid. I want to come back to that, but why don't you start by telling our listeners what you did and what made you motivated, proud even to work at usaid.
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B
Sure, yeah. I worked at USAID for about a little over 12 years under four different presidential administrations. I started in tuberculosis, was in charge of making sure that our funding in TB was, was used to achieve the most results, affect the most patients, and identify and get the most patients treated as possible for the amount of money that we had. And then ultimately, basically, I, I was the director of Policy Programs and Planning for Global Health when the Trump administration came in. So my job was basically to make sure that we were being good stewards of American taxpayer dollars specifically for global health, and to make sure that they were being used to achieve the maximum impact possible. And we did have an enormous impact. I mean, for a shoestring budget that was about less than 1% of the US federal budget, we saved over 92 million lives over the past 20 years alone, which is kind of an incredible impact. So it was a wonderful job. I can't imagine being able to find another job where I'd be able to have such a broad impact and helped so many people. Yes, I was very proud of what I did.
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So November 2024, you obviously knew, new administration in the White House here in Geneva. We knew, too, there are going to be cuts. The big aid agencies were expecting cuts from the US I have to say, we didn't expect the kind of scorched earth. Did you?
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No, No, I did not. And we also saw writing on the wall when Trump was elected. Right. We weren't blind. We. We had been here for the first Trump administration and kind of had a sense of what his policy priorities were. But, you know, there were some hints that while there. There were going to be changes, for sure. There was broad support, even among the administration for, for global health. I mean, that our objectives of increasing global life expectancy and expanding access to medical services and healthcare access were pretty universally supported. So we weren't that concerned. And then when the Secretary of State was announced to be Marco Rubio, we again kind of breathed a collective sigh of relief because Marco Rubio had been an enormous supporter of USAID and international development in general, and had been one of our strongest supporters in the Senate for years. And so, of course, the big difference with this administration was they had this new thing called the Department of Government Efficiency, you know, run by Elon Musk, in theory. To me, it actually didn't sound like a terrible idea that would bring in an outsider to find ways to make our programs more efficient. And that was actually what my job was. And I had a long list of things that I thought we could do to make USAID more efficient. Not that it wasn't efficient before, but there's always ways to improve it. And naively, I had developed a list that I was looking forward to talking to the Doge team when they came to explain how I could help them make USAID more efficient, but, of course, never got that opportunity.
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A
You write compellingly about how this then unfolded in early 2025 for our listeners, give them a little flavor. What are the kind of things that happened as the kind of dismantling of USAID began?
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Yeah, I think maybe the most shocking piece was the ignorance and Indifference of the people who came in, in charge, the DOGE teams and the political appointees. So the first time that I actually got the chance to brief them on what we did in global health and just gave them a very broad overview of what we did in terms of infectious diseases, maternal and child health, family planning, etc. Just very, you know, 30,000 foot view of what we do, they were shocked. And actually the chief of staff of the agency, the guy who's in charge of what's going to happen with usaid, said, oh, I had no idea that USAID did all this work. When I thought of what USAID did in global health and I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.
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So he's just been reading misinformation, disinformation, propaganda on social media. If he thinks that that's correct, whoever that is has not bothered to actually really look at what USAID does and is making major policy.
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That's right. I think that there was a lot of willful ignorance. It wasn't just an ignorance of global health or international development, it was a complete ignorance of how the government works. These were people that didn't have a lot of experience even being managers. So as they came in with this extremely high stakes task of ripping apart an agency that was tasked with saving lives all around the world as problems arose, as of course they would, they had absolutely no idea how to fix them and ended up causing infighting and squabbling between the political appointees and DOGE and the career staff that were left there were just kind of left, you know, shaking our heads as we witnessed the destruction and the damage without really having any, any way to try to help resolve the problems.
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So some people, my friends and colleagues, when they go on a really steep learning curve and as journalists kind of this happens quite a lot if we go somewhere brand new that we perhaps have a preconception of how things will be, but when we get there, our whole story changes because it's not like that. Did you ever hope that the people who are, who were dismantling USAID might, might reconsider once you told them what it really did?
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Yes, I did. I held out hope for a while and frankly that's probably why I stayed there so long. And there couple of moments when I was able to kind of provide a little bit of context for what they were destroying that I think did give them pause. I remember for example, describing that their freeze on foreign aid had interrupted clinical trials testing new tuberculosis drugs on drug resistant tuberculosis and that the interruptions to Those trials and that treatment not only threatened the lives of those patients that were on the treatment, but also risked further mutations of the bacteria that would potentially result in the development of new and untreatable strains of a airborne infectious disease. And the way that that was a national security threat to the US and so I think that there were times that I was starting to be able to break through there and they say, well, we have to fix that. But then I had to explain, well, you know, you put the entire tuberculosis division onto administrative leave, and so we don't have our experts here anymore. Even by that point, it was already too late and the damage had been done, our systems had been destroyed and the problems couldn't be resolved.
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You quite powerfully say in your book that some of the actions taken by this Doge team were illegal. Now, I'm going to give you a perspective, which is increasingly common here in Europe, that there's an awful lot of stuff going on in Washington that's illegal. And what I hear frequently here is when are the Americans going to say enough is enough?
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Yeah, I think that that's an excellent perspective and I share it. And I wonder when we're going say enough is enough. We saw Doge absolutely flaunt federal court orders to stop the termination of contracts. We saw them take apart the, the expertise in a way that violated federal law. We saw them violate the intent of Congress in terms of funding that they had appropriated for specific disease areas or health areas just be diverted completely and that entire health stream have all its contracts terminated. And so, yeah, there were quite a few illegal action that I witnessed by Doge. And the fact was that was part of their plan. Their goal was to destroy as much as they could as quickly as possible. So that even when Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, issued a waiver to the pause on foreign assistance for life saving work, they had destroyed so much of the system. They had broken the payment system. They had locked people out that were the experts that were needed to, to implement the programs. They terminated the contracts and it was impossible to even do the small pieces that politically the leadership in the State Department was trying to save because of the destruction that Doge had wrought.
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Some people might say you're pretty brave writing this book, given the penchant for retribution that this administration, or, I mean, you must be blunt, the President seems to have for people who are critical.
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Well, I appreciate that. I mean, at the time, it certainly did not feel brave. It felt like it was the decision that I had to make. I tried for a very long time to work within the system to try to save parts of our programs. And at the point that all of our contracts were terminated by doge, I realized that there was nothing that was going to be able to be saved. And I felt like I couldn't stay silent. I needed to let the world know what was actually happening inside USAID and what it would mean for people around the world and for American national security if these cuts were allowed to continue. So it didn't feel brave, it just felt like it was what needed to happen given how much was being destroyed so quickly.
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A
Where, where does the US go from here in terms of humanitarian aid? And where do you go personally?
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Well, to me, I think it's going to become very clear. It's already clear to me that we need to reestablish an agency for international development and foreign assistance. And when I say reestablish, I don't mean we need to set up the exact same thing that we had before. But I think the first thing we need to break down, and I hope to do this in my book, is the idea that USAID was destroyed because it was wasteful or because it wasn't working or for any of the other reasons that you're hearing now. It was destroyed by people who really had no idea what they were doing and because of the vindictive ego of Elon Musk. So I think that that needs to be the starting point. It was working and served an incredible purpose both in terms of humanitarian need and American national security. And I think that we do have an enormous opportunity to what we bring back to be different and better and address some of the concerns and inefficiencies that we all had been fighting against. But we absolutely need to see, and I believe will see at some point, an independent agency to administer international development within the US Government.
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Nicholas Enrich. There with an insider's account of dramatic days and terrible consequences for the work of what was once a globally important aid and development agency. Saving lives around the world destroyed in weeks. And now to our next book, and it's one. Being a journalist myself, I was especially interested to read and, and especially interested to talk to its author. The questions it poses are challenging. When we report on terrible conflicts, on atrocities, on possible war crimes, what kind of language do we use? And is the outrage that should probably greet every atrocity diminished by our attitude to those committing the violations? Adam Johnson knows what he thinks and he feels so strongly about it, he's produced a forensic, data driven book to prove his case.
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My name is Adam Johnson, I'm a media analyst. I wrote the book how to Sell a the Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. And I am the co host of the Citations Needed podcast, a media criticism podcast.
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A
Tell me about the book then. Because obviously this is our podcast. Books to make youe Think. What. What prompted you to write how to Sell a Genocide?
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Well, I had written about what I viewed as propaganda or misleading media narratives justifying the genocide from the very beginning. I'm someone who had written about Gaza in particular and Israel and the US's relationship in particular for almost a decade now. As of course, as you know, almost virtually every major human rights and aid organization has found Gaza to be a genocide. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, the United Nations. So United Nations.
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The Commission of Inquiry.
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The Commission of Inquiry. Right. They'll push back on that as the UN itself I don't think makes that official designation, but certainly many objective or neutral third parties that have been tasked even in the so called west to determine these things. 86% of those in the International association for the International association of Genocide Scholars has found as much. So it's more or less universal consensus that it is a genocide.
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Let me just jump in there because this was in a way my next question for you. You looked at mainstream US media, I mean traditionally liberal, the ones that we often hear called fake news these days. You know, they're called fake news by the current US administration, but they have long decades, centuries, some of them of what many of us would regard as high standards of objectivity.
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Yes, which is what gives them such purchase. Just like you needed the New York Times editorial board to support the war in Iraq and the Washington Post editorial board to prop up Colin Powell in front of the UN talking about chemical weapons in Iraq. You need liberal buy in to sell something like this. A sustained genocide, the killing, the mass slaughter of tens of Thousands, potentially over 100,000 in Gaza over a period of a year. The timeframe the book is positioned in. And that requires liberal media buy in New York Times, cnn. And so this book is about the crisis of liberalism at its core and how Israel and how Gaza to a great extent exposed those contradictions pretty nakedly.
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A
So I want to get into this because you've done a really impressive forensic examination of the kind of language used by some of the media you mentioned. The New York Times would be one. But I mean, do you genuinely think this was a conscious that journalists at those media outlets consciously decided to support a genocide?
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C
What they consciously or what's in their hearts is irrelevant to me. There's a famous adage that the purpose of a system is what it does. What your intent is is not really relevant to me as a media analyst. What I'm interested in is what you do. And so you can use outcome based metrics to show obvious manifests racism in coverage. And so we document those as a starting place. This is indeed the first two chapters, right? So we established bias as a premise and then from there we asked the question as to why. And so we have for example, asymmetry of emotive terms, right? Which is when an Israeli is killed, it is put in these tabloid emotive language. When a Palestinian is killed, it is put in more anodyne, almost medical like language. This, this, this is a proxy for humanization because people who die in medical like ways are not considered humans. They're considered kind of proto cadavers that we can vaguely lament, but we're not really going to put in emotionally charged ways. And so, for example, the terms massacre and slaughter were used overwhelmingly asymmetrical in, in US media. Our survey of the first hundred days found that the New York Times referred to the killing of Israelis on October 7th as a massacre 124 times and a slaughter 53 times. And they referred in the same timeframe to the killing of Palestinians, despite the fact in the first hundred days the killing was seven or eight times more than October 7th. They used similar language zero times. The Washington Post was 50 to 00. Not once did they refer to anything Israel did to Palestinians in the first 100 days as a massacre or a slaughter. Or as we'll also discuss, barbaric or savage. By definition, these are terms only reserved for the killing of Israelis who are considered civilized and more human. Washington posted a similar outcome. 50 to 0 for massacre, 25 to 0 for slaughter. AP was 80 to 0 for massacre and 18 to 0 for slaughter. CNN.com was 43 to 0, 14 to 0 for massacre and slaughter respectively. And then this was also reflected on cable. So CNN in the first, during our survey period of the first hundred days, or rather first year, used the term massacre to describe the killing of Israelis 225 times. This includes on air anchors and pundits and used the term massacre for the killing of Palestinians 16 times. So 225 to 16 slaughter was 79 to 2, savage was 130 and barbaric was 56 to 0. So slaughter and savage are never ever used for Israel, for Israel. And the question I propose is do you think that it's possible Israel killed 20,000 children? At least that's the official number, that no one disputes. 20,000 children over two years and never once committed a massacre or slaughter. Does that feel statistically likely to you? I think the answer is, on its face, no.
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A
Well, I think myself and my colleagues in Geneva would not disagree with you. We have multiple aid agencies. We can't go there. That's one of the things. This is a deep question for me because you have outlined humanizing versus dehumanizing language which has been used. And I'm just wondering, you said you wanted to get to the. Why. Why do you think that happened? Did you talk to journalists from some of these organizations about the kind of pressure? Because there has been a lot.
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C
Yeah, we have several sources at cnn, msnbc. A lot of them were very happy to talk. A lot of them had felt guilty, frankly, for what they felt like their coverage was and needed to exorcise some demons. We had several from cbs, from the Washington Post and LA Times. A story begins to emerge and it's a story that I have not heard anyone really bother to contest. So I'll give you one potent example. We talked to several sources who had their social media monitored, sometimes by co workers who are even in their union, who were pro Israel. And if even the most generic milquetoast sentiments in support of Palestine, like just calling for the bringing in of aid, were framed as violating these, again, somewhat ad hoc and obviously very much asymmetrically enforced neutrality standards, whereas the most genocidal statements or most pro Israel statements were simply allowed. And anyone, especially anyone who was perceived as Muslim, coded or sympathetic to Palestine, were immediately disciplined and in the case of Ayman Moyuddine, effectively demoted, or in the case of Mehdi Hasan, effectively pushed out. And so this was something you saw time and time again. And I will say, to the extent to which groups like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International had to maintain their credibility, they very belatedly acknowledged it was a genocide. Human Rights Watch's case, I think it took him roughly six months or so to state what was obvious. I will say other institutions came out looking much better.
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Well, I think I work out of Geneva, so I would say I have a certain amount of respect for not bandying the word genocide around too rapidly or too lightly because it is a very. It's a very big word, a very emotive word.
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C
Yeah, it's a word that carries certain implications and obligations. But in the instance of Gaza, Israeli leaders were saying genocidal statements, at the very least within weak, making, making promises to cut off aid, food, fuel. Again, I think one should be very careful about how they bandy about that word. But when you have the the prime minister give a speech, as he did on the eve of the invasion of Gaza in mid October of 2023, when he talks about, you know, Amloc, which is inherently a genocidal reference, when you have Yoav Galant talk about human animals, which is straight out of Rwanda, when you have supposedly liberal President Isaac Herzog talking about how there's no innocence in Gaza, I'm paraphrasing, but he said something to the effect of this thing about their being innocents in Gaza. They all knew these are genocidal language, and they were presented as such at the International Court of Justice on January 26, 2024, because that's the thing that precedes genocide. And every single thing that was promised by Gallant and Netanyahu ended up happening. They were going to live in tents, that ended up happening. They were going to cut off food and fuel, that ended up happening. Mass starvation happened. Preventable disease, death by preventable disease skyrockets. So every single genocidal statement they made was a statement of intent, and it was an intent that actually happened.
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Adam Johnson, author of how to Sell a Genocide for those of us reporting from Geneva who have struggled sometimes even to get the accounts of the aid agencies, the doctors or nurses who are working in Gaza onto our editorial agenda, or who have faced pressure to tone down our language, or been told that verified facts around malnutrition or the number of children who have died are not verified facts at all. This is a book that will strike a chord and remind us to stand up for facts and always check the kind of language we. And that brings us to the end of books to make you think on Inside Geneva. But before we go, here's a quick taster of our next podcast where we're going to hear from some of the people running to be the next UN Secretary General. The United nations is 80 years old, but it's never had a woman as its leader. Is this the year I'm running to be Secretary General? Because I think I. I am the best person for the job. Okay, Short and sweet.
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Thank you.
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I think that when it comes to an election, national or international, we are electing the best person for the job.
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We are not electing a gender for the job.
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And what about the UN's importance today? Can it make its way back to relevancy by solving conflicts and restoring peace, perhaps? Or will the next Secretary general, possibly finally a woman, inherit a dying institution? I think the UN does not suffer from a crisis of purpose or principles enshrined in the Charter. It suffers from a crisis of delivery, of impact, of accountability and of inclusion. We must win the battle of development by promoting jobs for youth, women, investment, infrastructure, climate, justice and fair access to finance. Sometimes silence cannot happen if civilians are being killed. The Secretary General has to speak, but also has to work in dialogue with all members. Say that doesn't mean dialogue. Dialogue doesn't mean endorsement. I mean you can dialogue and work with countries that you have or governments who have criticized. I have worked with governments I have publicly criticized. But that doesn't mean endorsement. Means that you have to engage. That episode is out on July 7th. Do join us then on Inside Geneva for now. I'm Imogen folks. Thanks for listening. A reminder, you've been listening to Inside Geneva, a Swiss info production. You can subscribe to us and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our previous episodes how the International Red Cross Unites Prisoners of War with Their Families or why Survivors of Human Rights Violations Turn to the UN In Geneva for Justice. I'm Imogen folks. Thanks again for listening.
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C
Sam.