Books to make you think

This week, Inside Geneva presents the newest instalment of our “Books to make you think” series.

We talk to an author who had a ringside seat as the US development agency USAID was being destroyed.

“The people who so recklessly tore down the agency [...] are still sitting in high government positions and have not been held accountable for their actions, so I intentionally named names in the book and explained exactly who was responsible and why,” says Nicholas Enrich, author of Into the Wood Chipper.

“USAID was destroyed by people who really had no idea what they were doing, and because of the vindictive ego of Elon Musk,” continues Enrich.

And we hear about a forensic analysis of the language used by US media to report the war in Gaza.

“The New York Times referred to the killing of Israelis on October 7 as a ‘massacre’ 124 times, and a ‘slaughter’ 53 times. In the same time frame, they used similar language zero times to describe the killing of Palestinians, despite the fact that, in the first 100 days, the death toll was seven or eight times higher than on October 7. Zero, not once, did they describe anything Israel did to the Palestinians in that period as a massacre or a slaughter,” says Adam H. Johnson, author of How to Sell a Genocide.

Did the mainstream media sanitise war crimes?

“Do you think that it is possible Israel killed 20,000 children at least – that’s the official number that no one disputes – over two years and never once committed a massacre or a slaughter? Does that feel statistically likely to you? I think the answer is, on its face, ‘no’,” says Johnson.

Join host Imogen Foulkes on Inside Geneva.

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Host: Imogen Foulkes
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Transcript

Welcome And Two Books Ahead

SPEAKER_05 0:00

SwissInfo podcasts.

SPEAKER_04 0:09

This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, Imogen Folkes, and this is a production from Swiss Info, the international public media company of Switzerland. In today's program.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

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.

SPEAKER_03 0:58

I think the answer is on its face no.

SPEAKER_04 1:05

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 by a former staff member who saw the consequences of Elon Musk's famous woodchipper close up.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

The idea that USAID was destroyed because it was wasteful or because it wasn't working or for any other reasons that you're hearing now. It was destroyed by people who really had no idea what they were doing, um, and because of the the vindictive um ego of Elon Musk.

SPEAKER_04 1:47

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?

SPEAKER_03 2:02

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 in the same time frame 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 use similar language zero times, zero not once. Did they refer to anything Israel to the Palestinians in the first hundred days as a massacre or a slaughter?

SPEAKER_04 2:25

That was Adam Johnson, whose book, How to Sell a Genocide, has caused a lot of soul searching among the US media. But

Why A USAID Insider Speaks

SPEAKER_04 2:34

first, let's hear from Nicholas Enrich, author of Into the Wood Chipper, 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.

SPEAKER_02 3:08

Since then, um, have written a book called Into the Wood Chipper, a whistleblower's account of how the Trump administration shredded USAID.

SPEAKER_04 3:16

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.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

Yeah, um, 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 think my primary motivation was for 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 uh 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 to be 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.

SPEAKER_04 4:50

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?

The Real Work Of USAID

SPEAKER_02 5:14

Sure. Yeah, I worked at USAID for about uh a little over 12 years under four different presidential administrations. I started in uh tuberculosis, was in charge of making sure that our funding in TB was used to achieve the most results, affect the most uh patients, and identify and get the most patients treated as possible for the amount of money that we had. And then ultimately, basically, I was the director of policy programs and planning for uh 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 uh less than 1% of the US federal budget, we 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 I can't imagine uh being able to find another job where I'd be able to have such a broad impact and help so many people. Yes, I was very proud of what I did.

SPEAKER_04 6:23

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?

SPEAKER_02 6:45

No, no, I did not. And we also saw writing on the wall when Trump was elected, right? We weren't going into this 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 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 uh 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 uh USAID more efficient. Not that it wasn't efficient before, but there's always ways to improve it. Um, 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.

SPEAKER_04 8:15

You write compellingly about how this then unfolded in early 2025.

DOGE Arrives And Damage Spreads

SPEAKER_04 8:23

For our listeners, give them a little flavor. What are the kind of things that happened as the kind of dismantling of USAID began?

SPEAKER_02 8:31

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, et cetera. 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 USA did all this work. When I thought of what USAID did in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.

SPEAKER_04 9:13

So he's just been reading misinformation, disinformation propaganda on social media, if he thinks that.

SPEAKER_02 9:19

That's correct.

SPEAKER_04 9:20

Whoever that is has not bothered to actually really look at what USAID does and is making major policy.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

That's right. I think that um 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 way to try to help resolve the problems.

SPEAKER_04 10:12

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?

SPEAKER_02 10:38

Yes, I did. I held out hope for a while. And frankly, that's probably why I stayed there so long. And there were a 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.

Court Orders Ignored And Laws Broken

SPEAKER_04 11:45

You quite powerfully say in your book that some of the actions taken by this doge team were illegal. Now, I'm gonna 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 gonna say enough is enough?

SPEAKER_02 12:10

Yeah, I I think that that's uh an excellent perspective and I share it. Um and I wonder when we're going to say enough is enough. We saw Doge absolutely flaunt federal court orders to stop the termination of contracts. We saw them take apart 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 help stream have all its contracts terminated. And so, yeah, there were quite a few illegal actions 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 if when Marco Rubia, the Secretary of State, issued a waiver to the PAWs 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 implement the programs, they terminated the contracts. 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 brought.

SPEAKER_04 13:25

Some people might say you're pretty brave writing this book, given the penchant for retribution that uh this administration, or I mean, you must be blunt, the president seems to have for people who are who are critical.

SPEAKER_02 13:39

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 I tried for a very long time to work within the system to try to save parts of our programs. And by the at the point that all of our contracts were terminated by Doge, it 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.

What Replaces USAID Now

SPEAKER_04 14:18

Where does the US go from here in terms of humanitarian aid? And where do you go personally?

SPEAKER_02 14:25

Well, to me, I think it's going to become very clear. It's already clear to me that we need to re-establish an agency for international development and foreign assistance. I it and when I say re-establish, 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 were had been fighting against. But we absolutely need to see, and and I believe we'll see at some point an independent agency to administer international development within the US government.

SPEAKER_04 15:40

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.

How US Media Frames Gaza

SPEAKER_04 16:01

And now to our next book, and it's one being a journalist myself, I was especially interested to read, 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 agree 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.

SPEAKER_03 16:51

And I am a the co-host of the Citations Needed podcast, a media criticism podcast.

SPEAKER_04 16:56

Tell me about the book then, because the obviously this is our podcast books to make you think. What prompted you to write how to sell a genocide?

SPEAKER_03 17:08

Well, uh, I had written about the what I viewed as propaganda or misleading media narratives justifying the genocide from the very beginning. Um I'm someone who had written about Gaza in particular and Israel and the US's relationship in particular for over almost a decade now. Um 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, Amosy International, uh Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders.

SPEAKER_04 17:37

So United Nations The Commission of Inquiry.

SPEAKER_03 18:00

So it's more or less universal consensus that it is a genocide.

SPEAKER_04 18:04

Let me just jump in there. Um, because this was this was in a way my my next uh question for you. You looked at mainstream US media, I mean traditionally liberal, the ones that 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, that some of them, of what many of us would regard as high standards of objectivity.

SPEAKER_03 18:37

Yes. Which is what which is what gives them such purchase. Uh 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, uh Colin Powell in front of the UN talking about chemical weapons in Iraq. You need liberal buy-in to sell something like this, a a sustained genocide, the the killing, the mass slaughter of tens of thousands, potentially uh over a hundred thousand, uh in Gaza over a period of of a year, the the time frame the book is is positioned in. Um and that requires uh liberal media buy-in. New York Times, CNN, and so this this book is about the crisis of liberalism at its core and how Israel and how Gaza to a great extent exposed those those contradictions uh pretty nakedly.

SPEAKER_04 19:22

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 a conscious that journalists at those media outlets consciously decided to support a genocide?

SPEAKER_03 19:44

What they consciously or what's in their hearts is irrelevant to me. There's a famous adage, the the purpose of a system is what it does. What your intent is is not really relevant to me as an as a as a as a as a as a media analyst. Uh what I'm interested in is what you do. And so you can use outcome-based metrics to show obvious manifests racism uh in coverage. And so uh we document those as a starting place. This is indeed the first two chapters, right? So we established bias as a as a as a premise, and then from there we ask the question as to why.

Counting Words That Dehumanize

SPEAKER_03 20:18

Uh, 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 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 um put in emotionally charged ways. And so, for example, the terms massacre and slaughter were used overwhelmingly asymmetrical in in US media. Uh, our survey of the first hundred days uh 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 in the same time frame to the killing of Palestinians, despite the fact in the first hundred days the killing was seven or eight times more than October 7th. Uh, they used similar language uh zero times. Uh the Washington Post was 50 to 0. Zero, not once. Did they refer to anything Israel did the Palestine Palestinians in the first hundred 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 uh civilized and more human. Washington Post had a similar outcome: 50 to zero for massacre, 25 to zero for slaughter. AP was 80 to 0 for massacre and 18 to zero for slaughter. CNN.com was 43 to 0, 14 to 0 for massacre and slaughter, respectively. Uh and then this was also reflected uh on cable. So CNN in the first uh during our survey period of the first hundred days, or rather, first year, uh used the term massacre to describe the killing of Israelis 225 times. This is this includes uh on air anchors, reporters, and punchers. And used the term massacre for the killing of Palestinians 16 times. So 225 to 16. Slaughter was 79 to 2. Savage was 13 to 0. 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.

SPEAKER_04 22:32

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.

Pressure Inside Newsrooms

SPEAKER_04 22:50

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.

SPEAKER_03 23:07

Yeah, we have several sources at CNN, MSNBC. There were very 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 exercise some demons. Um we had several from CBS, uh, from the Washington Post and LA Times, and uh a story begins to emerge, and it's a story that I 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 coworkers who are even in their union, who were pro-Israel, and if even the most generic milkedtoast sentiments in support of Palestine, like just calling for the bringing in of aid, were framed as uh 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 uh or sympathetic to Palestine, were immediately disciplined, and in the case of uh Ayman Moyadin, effectively demoted, uh, or in the case of Media Sun, effectively pushed out. Um, and so this was something you saw time and time again. Um you know, and 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. Uh in human rights, Human Rights Watch's case, I think it took them roughly six months or so to state what was obvious. Um I will say other institutions came out looking much better.

SPEAKER_04 24:34

Um Well, I think I work out of Geneva, so I I would say um 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 motive word.

SPEAKER_03 24:49

Aaron Powell Yeah, it's a word that carries certain implications and obligations. But in the instance of Gaza, the you know Israeli leaders were saying genocidal statements at the very least within within a week, uh making making promises to cut off aid, food, fuel. Again, I think one should be very careful about how they bandy about that word. Um 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 Amloc, which is inherently a genocidal reference, when you have uh Johav 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 there being innocence in Gaza, they they all knew. Uh, these are genocidal language, and they were presented as such by you know at the International Court of Justice on January 26, 2024, uh, because that's that's the thing that precedes genocide. And every single thing that was promised by Galant and Netanyahu ended up happening. They were gonna live in tents, that ended up happening. Uh, they were gonna cut off food and fuel, that ended up happening, mass starvation happened, uh, 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.

SPEAKER_04 26:06

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 use. And that brings us to the end of Books to Make You Think on Inside Geneva.

Next Show Preview And Farewell

SPEAKER_04 27:00

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?

SPEAKER_06 27:19

I'm running to be Secretary General because I think I am the best person for the job. Okay. Short and free. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 27:29

I think that when it comes to an election, national or international, we are electing the best person for the job. We are not electing a gender for the job.

SPEAKER_04 27:40

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?

SPEAKER_07 27:58

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.

SPEAKER_00 28:13

We must win the button of development by promoting jobs for youth, women, investment, infrastructure, climate justice, and access to finance.

SPEAKER_06 28:29

Sometimes silence cannot happen. If civilians are being killed, the civil general has to speak. But also has to work and dialogue with all member states. That doesn't mean dialogue doesn't mean endorsement. I mean you can dialogue and work with countries that you have, or governments you have criticized. I have worked with governments I have publicly criticized. But that doesn't mean endorsement means that you have to engage.

SPEAKER_04 28:53

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.