No, Aaron Bushnell was not ordered to deploy to Israel
Someone has been misrepresenting my reporting about the Biden administration's support for the Israeli military.
On Sunday, active-duty airman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy to protest U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza. It was an “extreme act of protest,” in Bushnell’s words, a shocking and ultimately deadly statement of support for the Palestinian cause.
I wrote something for Reason about the police response to Bushnell’s death. An older article of mine has been also resurfaced — and quoted in misleading ways — by people trying to make sense of Bushnell’s actions. People are using my earlier Intercept reporting on U.S. military support for Israel to imply that Bushnell himself had been deployed there, which is not true.
I’ve written a lot about viral misinformation and disinformation, how real stories are misunderstood or distorted on purpose. But I’ve never had my own reporting misrepresented like this. And this disinformation has a wide reach; my own father saw it on TikTok and mentioned it to me, without realizing where the story originated.
Bushnell was an IT engineer at the 531st Intelligence Support Squadron, which helps provide ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) coverage of Latin America, according to Ken Klippenstein. Over the years, he had become disillusioned with America’s “violent domination of the world” in a general sense, with Israeli rule over Palestinians as the most urgent example.
Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, citing my reporting in The Intercept about U.S. Air Force intelligence support for Israel, tried to argue that “Bushnell did not kill himself to protest some other country's war.”
“The U.S. Department of Defense has compelled the participation of Air Force members like Bushnell in Israel's Gaza genocide,” Blumenthal wrote above a copy of a deployment order for U.S. airmen in Israel. “Their orders to deploy to Israel read ‘mandatory.’”
The deployment order was from November, and it was a significant scoop because it revealed U.S. support for Israel that the Biden administration had not admitted to in public. The Air Force was sending air defense liaison teams and intelligence engagement officers, which implied that the U.S. military was actually helping Israeli troops pick targets in Gaza.
Again, Bushnell was in an intelligence unit that covers Latin America, and the deployment order did not apply to him. To be fair, Blumenthal did not outright claim that Bushnell had been sent to Israel, even if his tweet could be interpreted that way.
Others made ran with exactly that interpretation. Former FOX News host Andrew Napolitano, who now runs his own online show, claimed on Monday that “Max Blumenthal, who’s a latter-day Seymour Hersh when it comes to digging things up, found [Bushnell’s] orders — there it is — that he was ordered to be ready on a moment’s notice to deploy to Israel.” A copy of the deployment order flashed on the screen.
Jake Shields, a former mixed martial arts fighter who has become an anti-Israel influencer, also copied Blumenthal’s screenshot of the deployment order, without citing the source, and implied that it applied to Bushnell.
“People keep saying Aaron Bushnell killed himself for a another nation but that’s not true. He was a member of the Air Force and was called to duty,” Shields wrote. “They wanted him to bomb innocents in Iraq, Yemen and Syria while protecting genocide. Instead he chose to burn himself to death.”
Shields has also spread another false report about the immolation.
While Bushnell burned to death, a policeman pointed a gun at him, a scene that many critics found horrifying. The gunman was not wearing a uniform, or at least not one visible on video, leading to some confusion about his identity. Shields claimed that the Israeli consulate “sent someone out to shoot” Bushnell while American bystanders were trying to save his life. And he labeled the gunman with an Israeli flag emoji.
I did what every reporter should when posed with a question: I asked someone who would know the answer. (Newsweek did the same.) A spokesperson for the U.S. Secret Service confirmed to me that everyone on the scene was a Secret Service agent, including the gunman, whom the Secret Service said was “ensuring the safety” of other first responders.
It’s not clear where the notion that the officer was an Israeli embassy guard first came from. I suspect that it came from a viral tweet by a former congressional staffer speculating about the gunman’s identity. The former staffer took down the tweet when I pointed out it was false, so I will not be naming-and-shaming them here.
Not to sound too preachy, but these incidents underscore the importance of old-fashioned news reporting. There is no substitute — no amount of bureaucratic content moderation, AI gimmicks, or crowdsourced fact-checking — that can replace a reporter who picks up the phone and asks sources to confirm or deny information.
And that reporter does not have to come from legacy, mainstream media. I obtained those deployment orders as a humble freelancer. Anyone could have called the Secret Service spokesman, whose email address and phone number are available online. In fact, the most important details about Bushnell’s story were first broken by Talia Jane, a totally independent journalist who got in touch with the Bushnell family.
Ironically, in an age when it's easier than ever to do the work of journalism — reaching out to people to ask them questions — fewer people than ever are willing to do it.