Politics & Stuff

[cosmicway 1,323]

4 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Bizarre and reckless of Biden to do this -there was/is no way of knowing how Russia would respond. And the UK govt is just as bad - no vote by MPs as to whether its sensible to ifre British made Storm Shadow missiles into Russia.

Though not surprising as Kier Starmer is the first and only MP out of 650 to be inaugurated into an American Neo Con group Tripartite Commission

One thing you don't do in war is become shy towards the enemy.
So if I was a Japanese admiral could I say to the emperor "I 'm not going to Guadalcanal because the Americans are too strong there" ?
That kind of excuse would be sheer military nonsense.
Some excuse based on logistics maybe but to say in so many words "... because the Americans are too strong there" is sheer nonsense.
So therefore Ukraine are going to use the new weapons and use them again.

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[Vesper 28,813]

big loss for Trump

I guess a teen sex trafficker as the US top law enforcement officer was a bridge too far even for some MAGAts in the Senate

Edited Thursday at 17:48 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 16,849]

51 minutes ago, Vesper said:

big loss for Trump

I guess a teen sex trafficker as the US top law enforcement officer was a bridge too far even for some MAGAts in the Senate

Another one about to bite the dust ?

''Audio has been released of Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, comparing the president-elect to Hitler and suggesting some of his supporters were “outright Nazis” and “bootlickers”.

Clips were uncovered by CNN from Kennedy’s radio show “Ring of Fire”, when in 2016 the anti-vaccine activist applauded descriptions of Trump’s base as “belligerent idiots”

[cosmicway 1,323]

11 hours ago, KEVINAA said:

 

Eisenhower, General Zhukov ? Would those have been arrested as well ?

[Fulham Broadway 16,849]

There are yet to be any talks between Russia and the US as the situation continues to deteriorate and unravel.

The Kremlin dropped its deadly new Oreshnik hypersonic missile on Dnipro yesterday, as Ukraine continues to brace for further attacks. With Russia moving on the offensive, it was revealed on the country’s Telegram channel a meeting has been called for tonight amid fears of a new war which is dragging the world closer to the end.

Reuters

Happy days

[Fernando 6,463]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

There are yet to be any talks between Russia and the US as the situation continues to deteriorate and unravel.

The Kremlin dropped its deadly new Oreshnik hypersonic missile on Dnipro yesterday, as Ukraine continues to brace for further attacks. With Russia moving on the offensive, it was revealed on the country’s Telegram channel a meeting has been called for tonight amid fears of a new war which is dragging the world closer to the end.

Reuters

Happy days

He will wait for Trump and do the deal. 

[Vesper 28,813]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-22-trump-cabinet-sexual-assault-gaza/

Pete Hegseth, the nominee for Secretary of Defense.

 

The presumptive Secretary of Education is married to a man whose former employee alleges he forced her to perform sex acts with his friend for an hour and a half after he defecated on her head. The presumptive Commerce Secretary preemptively sued his former assistant in 2018, after her lawyer threatened to publicize “not pretty” 2 a.m. text messages she’d received from him and his wife. The presumptive Health and Human Services director’s explanation for forcibly groping a former nanny’s breasts while holding her hostage in a kitchen pantry was that he “had a very, very rambunctious youth”; he was 46 at the time. The White House efficiency czar, currently a defendant in a putative class-action lawsuit filed by eight former employees who accuse him of perpetrating an “Animal House” work environment of “rampant sexual harassment,” and paid a quarter of a million dollars to a flight attendant who says he got naked and asked her to touch his erect penis in exchange for the gift of a horse. 

And of course the presumptive Defense Secretary was accused of raping a woman who was tasked with monitoring what she described to police as his “creeper vibes” after a Republican women’s conference at which he was a keynote speaker, just a month and change after the birth of his fourth child with a woman who was not his wife at the time. (Reader, she married him.)

The aggressive rapeyness of the second Donald Trump administration is so tyrannical it’s almost enough to make a girl wistful for Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman who withdrew his name from attorney general contention yesterday (to make way for the despicable Pam Bondi) amid an orgy of leaks from two investigations into his sexploits with a 17-year-old procured by a convicted sex trafficker friend. Multiple witnesses testified that Gaetz did not actually know the 17-year-old was underage, you see, and that he ceased having sex with her when he found out. 

I don’t have a lot of warmth in my heart for Barack Obama, but America will always have the fact that he was never a world-renowned horndog. When he took office, as I remarked a year ago in an essay about founding Jezebel, the entire culture was dominated by networks of organized sex abuse. The coolest clothing brand was run by an unabashed sex predator. The second-coolest clothing brand was run by a recently indicted sex trafficker. The predominant underwear retailer was a front for Jeffrey Epstein, who was propositioning young women while literally serving a supposed “prison sentence” for sex crimes. The Vatican was helmed by a guy who spent his entire career covering up sex abuse accusations. Republicans had just lost control of Congress to revelations over their complicity in the systematic teenage intern abuse of a prominent Florida congressman and others; the Speaker of the House at the time quietly stepped down and would later be revealed as a systematic child sex abuser while he was a high school wrestling coach in the 1970s. The Abu Ghraib scandal showcased ritual sexual humiliation as a top American export. One-fifth of female veterans were diagnosed with disorders stemming from sexual trauma. Insatiable serial rapists ran the movie business and the music business; children's television was dominated by an accused pedophile, and so we would learn was the Penn State football program, USA Gymnastics, organized cheerleading, and of course just about every sector and obscure subsector of high and low finance.

During the Obama years millions of manufacturing jobs were wiped out, income inequality gaped, opioids consumed whole communities, and the titans of finance who collapsed the economy through fraud went unprosecuted, but “rape culture” retreated. Kid Cudi stole Diddy’s girlfriend, Kendrick Lamar made rap poetry again, the star of the era’s top-grossing movie franchise spent her down time in the Dakotas getting arrested for protesting oil pipelines. “Wokeness” in those early days conveyed a kind of vigilant neo-wholesomeness. It seemed in those days self-evident that sexual abuse was just a subset of dehumanization and exploitation that helpfully, unlike most forms of exploitation, happened to be illegal. 

And the moral core of resistance liberalism was a rejection of dehumanization in all forms. Where both Hillary and Trump had tried semi-successfully to redirect rape culture backlash against one another and other enemy tribes—the apocryphal “Bernie Bros” for Hillary, immigrants for Trump—the Pussy Hats found the apex of their cultural cachet fighting for someone they didn’t know: mothers whose babies had been seized at the border and warehoused in massive colorless child prisons, per a policy that had been somehow initially enacted under Barack Obama. It is so easy to forget now how the success of that movement led Ivanka Trump to lobby her father to issue an executive order 18 months into his presidency that ended the separations. During the pandemic again, resistance outrage on behalf of the invisible “essential workers” brought immediate material gains to nursing home aides, delivery drivers and meatpacking plant staffers in the form of hazard pay, government checks and a new sense of their importance within the broader community. 

But powerful forces wanted desperately to absorb the “resistance” into the profitable realm of insular partisan tribalism we know as “identity politics.” A random moment lodged for whatever reason in my hippocampus was the afternoon a gaggle of female attorneys with “I believe Christine Blasey Ford” pins on their handbags filed into happy hour at my obscenely expensive restaurant. I believed her too, one thousand percent, but the pins were… just a bit much. Years later I’d watch Brett Kavanaugh, in all his heinous glory, pompously inveighing against opponents of the deal that enabled the Sackler family to abuse the bankruptcy code to keep their multibillion-dollar fortune legally off-limits to the hundreds of thousands of families their opioid empire’s deliberate conspiracy had torn apart. Clearly his high school boorishness had been merely a harbinger of a legacy that would ultimately prove much darker. But as long as the affluent teenagers who’d been victimized by his like grew up to become corporate lawyers and lobbyists, no one was really incentivized to spell out those connections. 

When some genius at Kamala HQ concocted “We are not going back,” every woman who believed Christine Blasey Ford knew in a visceral sense exactly what that meant. After raking DJT over the coals for schtupping Stormy Daniels 18 years ago and attacking E. Jean Carroll in the Bergdorf dressing room the same year Bill attacked Monica with that cigar, "back" is exactly where the elites wanted to go. In Pete Hegseth, with his crusader tattoos and membership in the Erik Prince groupchat and entire post-military career bankrolled by the Koch network, with his 2002 article in the Princeton Tory arguing that sex with an unconscious person does not constitute “rape” and his two-year lobbying campaign to pardon accused war criminal Eddie Gallagher—a man described by a Navy SEAL colleague as “perfectly ok with killing anybody that was moving” who had been turned in by six members of his platoon because he was that “freaking evil”—we might have perhaps the purest distillation of right-wing rape culture in all its arrogant, white nationalist glory.

Except, of course, it is now November 2024, and so for the past 412 days since the Israeli defense minister announced he was cutting off all food and water to 2.5 million largely innocent refugees, I have watched the forces of a thousand Eddie Gallaghers unleashed each day in the effort to dehumanize Palestinians into extinction. From November and December when we watched the IDF bomb every hospital and school in Gaza, to January when we saw the first large-scale protests to stop the entry of aid trucks into the territory, to the slaughter of more than 100 Gazans lined up for flour and the surgical assassination of foreign aid workers in the spring, to the emphatic and self-righteous calls by journalists for the IDF to adopt an explicit pro-sexual assault policy after ten prison guards were punished for sodomizing Palestinian detainees with hot metal rods. By the end of October, Gaza as a place cannot be said to exist, and all that defined the lives of the 2.5 million who once lived there has been obliterated, but the continued drive to destroy has only swollen, expanded to encompass Beirut and Damascus and even Amsterdam.

This week Ha'aretz reported an “alarming rise” in rape inside Israel, especially among people under 18 who had been displaced from the south after October 7; forgive me if I am not alarmed.

Throughout all of this Joe Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken and their whole coterie of indistinguishably robotic flacks have stood unflailingly behind Netanyahu and his genocidal band of Jewish supremacist freaks, even as they openly plotted to sabotage his presidency in favor of one that might funnel the same tens of billions with more explicit enthusiasm and I guess, cooler tattoos. This week, when the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense secretary and Bernie Sanders rallied around a dozen and a half of his Senate colleagues in three ceremonial votes against sending any more offensive weapons to Israel, President Biden slammed the court as “outrageous,” labored behind the scenes to smear the senators as treasonous saboteurs and issued a formal statement consisting of little more than an unabashed dog whistle to Jewish supremacy: “Whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas.” For thirteen months now, a Democratic presidential administration has been toiling to remind Palestinians and anyone who might sympathize with them that they are not by the standards of the ruling class fully human: “Your body, my choice,” as the Trumpists would say.

Which brings me to the challenge ahead. Trump and his cabinet of sickos are about to spend the next four years doing some sadistic, heinous things. And yet the fact remains that the bar has been set by bankrolling a brand-new ICC-certified genocide; that’s the achievement of Joe Biden. And if we want our countrymen to unite in rejection of the cruelty around which Trump has built his brand, we cannot pretend the Democratic Party of 2024 represents a spotless alternative. We are not going back.

[Vesper 28,813]

 

real-time top 50 billionaires' net worth

Musk is just exploding, Ellison now a firm number two.

Arnault is now worth 70B or so less than his high, and Google co-founders (Page and Brin) are tumbling (and will probably continue to do so as the US likely rips Google apart over the next year or so).

 

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#591aee713d78

	1	Elon Musk	$321.7 B	▶ $7.3 B | 2.31%	53	Tesla, SpaceX	United States
	2	Larry Ellison	$235.3 B	▶ $373 M | 0.16%	80	Oracle	United States
	3	Jeff Bezos	$213.5 B	▶ $1.1 B | -0.53%	60	Amazon	United States
	4	Mark Zuckerberg	$193.5 B	▶ $1.3 B | -0.69%	40	Facebook	United States
	5	Bernard Arnault & family	$157.0 B	▶ $2.1 B | 1.36%	75	LVMH	France
	6	Warren Buffett	$149.7 B	▶ $1.5 B | 0.99%	94	Berkshire Hathaway	United States
	7	Larry Page	$137.2 B	▶ $2.2 B | -1.54%	51	Google	United States
	8	Sergey Brin	$131.4 B	▶ $2 B | -1.51%	51	Google	United States
	9	Amancio Ortega	$124.7 B	▶ $2.3 B | 1.84%	88	Zara	Spain
	10	Jensen Huang	$123.8 B	▶ $4.1 B | -3.18%	61	Semiconductors	United States
	11	Steve Ballmer	$123.3 B	▶ $920 M | 0.75%	68	Microsoft	United States
	12	Michael Dell	$111.6 B	▶ $1.9 B | 1.74%	59	Dell Technologies	United States
	13	Rob Walton & family	$109.0 B	▶ $1.9 B | 1.80%	80	Walmart	United States
	14	Jim Walton & family	$107.7 B	▶ $1.9 B | 1.81%	76	Walmart	United States
	15	Bill Gates	$105.9 B	▶ $931 M | 0.89%	69	Microsoft	United States
	16	Michael Bloomberg	$104.7 B	$0	82	Bloomberg LP	United States
	17	Alice Walton	$100.0 B	▶ $1.9 B | 1.91%	75	Walmart	United States
	18	Mukesh Ambani	$99.3 B	▶ $2.9 B | 2.98%	67	Diversified	India
	19	Carlos Slim Helu & family	$80.9 B	▶ $80 M | 0.10%	84	Telecom	Mexico
	20	Julia Koch & family	$74.2 B	$0	62	Koch, Inc.	United States
	21	Francoise Bettencourt Meyers & family	$72.0 B	▶ $1.2 B | 1.69%	71	L'Oréal	France
	22	David Thomson & family	$69.1 B	▶ $200 M | -0.29%	67	Media	Canada
	23	Charles Koch & family	$67.5 B	$0	89	Koch, Inc.	United States
	24	Changpeng Zhao	$62.2 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	47	Cryptocurrency exchange	Canada
	25	Thomas Peterffy	$57.2 B	▶ $25 M | -0.04%	80	Discount brokerage	United States
	26	Stephen Schwarzman	$57.0 B	▶ $1.2 B | 2.12%	77	Investments	United States
	27	Gautam Adani	$56.7 B	▶ $910 M | -1.58%	62	Infrastructure, commodities	India
	28	Zhong Shanshan	$51.5 B	▶ $935 M | 1.85%	69	Beverages, pharmaceuticals	China
	29	Jeff Yass	$49.6 B	$0	66	Trading, investments	United States
	30	Ken Griffin	$46.7 B	$0	56	Hedge funds	United States
	31	Prajogo Pangestu	$46.6 B	▶ $606 M | 1.32%	80	Petrochemicals, energy	Indonesia
	32	Zhang Yiming	$45.6 B	$0	40	TikTok	China
	33	Jacqueline Mars	$45.3 B	$0	85	Candy, pet food	United States
	33	John Mars	$45.3 B	$0	89	Candy, pet food	United States
	35	Tadashi Yanai & family	$45.1 B	▶ $450 M | 1.01%	75	Fashion retail	Japan
	36	Ma Huateng	$43.6 B	▶ $713 M | -1.61%	53	Online games	China
	37	Giovanni Ferrero	$42.0 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	60	Nutella, chocolates	Italy
	38	Shiv Nadar	$41.6 B	▶ $1.2 B | 3.05%	79	Software services	India
	39	Gerard Wertheimer	$40.7 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	73	Chanel	France
	39	Alain Wertheimer	$40.7 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	76	Chanel	France
	41	Savitri Jindal & family	$39.3 B	▶ $503 M | 1.30%	74	Steel	India
	42	Mark Mateschitz	$38.0 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	32	Red Bull	Austria
	43	Lukas Walton	$37.8 B	▶ $640 M | 1.73%	38	Walmart	United States
	44	Robin Zeng	$37.7 B	▶ $1.3 B | -3.32%	55	Batteries	Hong Kong
	45	Abigail Johnson	$37.5 B	$0	62	Fidelity	United States
	46	Klaus-Michael Kuehne	$37.3 B	▶ $126 M | 0.34%	87	Shipping	Germany
	47	Reinhold Wuerth & family	$36.2 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	89	Fasteners	Germany
	48	Li Ka-shing	$35.7 B	▶ $62 M | -0.17%	96	Diversified	Hong Kong
	49	Colin Huang	$35.3 B	▶ $1.4 B | -3.86%	44	E-commerce	China
	50	Phil Knight & family	$35.0 B	▶ $701 M | 2.04%	86	Nike	United States

[Vesper 28,813]

King Charles’s $91 Million Coronation Has Enraged the British Public

The price tag was revealed in an annual report, but one anti-monarchy advocate speculates the true cost could be even higher.

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/king-charless-dollar91-million-coronation-has-enraged-the-british-public

 

Britain's King Charles III wearing the Imperial state Crown carrying the Sovereign's Orb and Sceptre leaves Westminster Abbey after the Coronation Ceremonies on May 6, 2023 in London, England.by Ben Stansall/WPA Pool/Getty Images.

When Britain celebrated the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla in May 2023, the ancient ceremony came along with a ceremonial parade and days of celebration around the nation. On Thursday, the UK government announced that the festivities cost 72 million British pounds, or about 91 million dollars, a sum that has raised eyebrows amid the country’s ongoing economic doldrums.

In their annual report for the fiscal year that ran from March 2023 to March 2024, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport broke down their annual budget of 7.9 billion British pounds (about 9.9 billion dollars), and shared that approximately 50 million British pounds went towards the coronation weekend. The Home Office spent a further 22 million British pounds (about 28 million dollars) on policing for the events.

The department’s costs included the Westminster Abbey ceremony and associated programming across the weekend, including the Windsor Castle concert featuring Lionel Richie, Katy Perry, and a 300 person choir comprised of regular Britons, a day of Big Coronation Lunches across the nation, and a day of community service, which saw Prince William and Kate Middleton join in with their three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis. Further support for the events came from the Sovereign Grant, the public money given to the royals in exchange for their public duties and the proceeds from their historic property holdings. In their annual report, released in August, the Crown Estate shared that they spent 1.4 million British pounds (about 1.8 million dollars) on the coronation weekend over the course of two fiscal years.

Soon after Charles began his reign in September 2022, palace aides told Vanity Fair that the king wanted to stage a scaled-back coronation to avoid excessive public expense. But by December, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had announced that the weekend would include an extra bank holiday in the country, directing his cabinet to ensure the event showcased “the best of Britain.”

In their report, the DCMS justified the expense of the “once-in-a-generation moment” by pointing to its global impact. The coronation weekend “provided an occasion for the entire country to come together in celebration, and offered a unique opportunity to celebrate and strengthen our national identity and showcase the UK to the world,” the report read. “The coronation achieved more than 100,000 news stories and reached an estimated global audience of 2 billion people in 125 countries.” The report noted that the coronation reached more survey participants among the G20 nations than any other event put on by the department.

Graham Smith, CEO of anti-monarchy advocacy group Republic, believes that the sum put forward by the DCMS understates the true cost to the government. “I would be very surprised if £72m was the whole cost,” he told The Guardian. “It’s a huge amount of money to spend on one person’s parade when there was no obligation whatsoever in the constitution or in law to have a coronation, and when we were facing cuts to essential services.”

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GPAHE Brings You the Latest News in Far-Right Hate and Extremism   GPAHE’s new Resisting Authoritarianism initiative Project 2025 is here. This week, we’re highlighting how Trump’s nominees are linked to Project 2025 and hate and extremism through our new Resisting Authoritarianism initiative. GPAHE will continue to track and update you weekly on how Project 2025 becomes reality. We encourage you to explore this series to stay informed and engaged. GPAHE Takes Action Against Trump’s Authoritarian Agenda With Trump soon to assume the presidency, the U.S. is facing growing authoritarianism fueled by Christian Nationalism, extremism, and hate. At GPAHE, we firmly believe that as a nation we can stop these harmful agendas and reverse rights-restricting policies. We are not standing idly by and are already fighting Trump’s dangerous agenda in order to protect our democracy and human rights. GPAHE’s new Resisting Authoritarianism initiative delves into the key figures and policies shaping Trump’s agenda, including the Project 2025 authoritarian blueprint, exposing the individuals and groups poised to consolidate far-right power, and works to stop their progress. This week, we begin our efforts by profiling Trump’s nominees to powerful positions and their links to hate and extremism. Our research will be used to inform the upcoming Senate confirmation hearings. Pete Hegseth: An Anti-Muslim, Christian Nationalist “Crusader” in the Pentagon? Brendan Carr: The Impending Death of Independent Media and Free Speech at the FCC Tulsi Gabbard: How an Extremist Cult Shaped the Anti-LGBTQ+ Crusader into Intelligence Chief Kristi Noem: Anti-Muslim, Anti-Immigrant Zealot and “Killer” Governor to Lead Homeland Security Matt Gaetz: From Despicable Bigotry to Allegations of Sexual Misconduct, Uniquely Unqualified to be AG (one down) From exposing these dangerous figures to fighting discriminatory policies and defending democratic institutions, GPAHE is committed to action. We will not allow Trump and his allies to dismantle our rights or undermine our democracy. Stay informed through GPAHE’s newsletters, Project 2025 updates, and the latest reports on our Resisting Authoritarianism page. Together, we can protect the values that define our democracy.

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Media Matters weekly newsletter, November 22

https://www.mediamatters.org/media-matters-weekly-newsletter/media-matters-weekly-newsletter-november-22-0

• How Fox News powered Trump’s first term — and what that means for his second. 
• MAGA allies in the media make the case for Trump to ignore the Senate confirmation process. 
• The Trump administration is planning on deporting millions and millions of immigrants. Fox News is pretending the focus will be much narrower. 

• This week in stupid

  • The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles: “Atheist chaplains, in a way, have already existed for a long time and we just call them psychiatrists.”
  • Fox’s Jesse Watters said Trump’s cabinet picks are there to be good on TV: “This is a federal bureaucracy. It runs itself.”
  • Newsmax's Greg Kelly: Matt Gaetz “could always come and work here at Newsmax, as he has done quite a bit over the past couple of years.” 
  • Jesse Watters suggested a “special prosecutor” role for Matt Gaetz. 
  • Tomi Lahren said the nomination and withdrawal of Matt Gaetz for attorney general “has the art of the deal written all over it.” 

  This week in scary

  • Charlie Kirk’s guest Darren Beattie said “there will be Armageddon for any senator who does not step in line” with Trump’s appointees. 
  • Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk promised mass deportations and warned: “If a Democrat gets in our way, well, then Matt Gaetz very well might go arrest you.” 
  • Project 2025’s Russ Vought: “The whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.” 
  • Fox’s Jesse Watters celebrated Trump’s promise to use the military to deport immigrants “the hard way.”

  Excuse me?

  • Fox host Brian Kilmeade said Matt Gaetz’s congressional persona is “not somebody to unify, rally around, that speaks for law and order.” 
  • The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles told Rep.-elect Sarah McBride: “How about you … act like a gentleman and stay out of the women’s bathroom.” 
  • Fox’s Laura Ingraham said Trump’s agenda will be “tough for the economy. There is no doubt about it.”
  • Fox Business host Dagen McDowell said firing thousands of career civil servants will be “a renaissance in America.”

  Check this out

  • Media Matters President Angelo Carusone discussed how Trump secretary of defense pick and former Fox host Peter Hegseth “sees the world through crusader terms.” 
  • Media Matters’ Matt Gertz discussed the revolving door between Fox and the second Trump administration with On the Media.

Edited 14 hours ago by Vesper

[KEVINAA 97]

Video uploaded on November 5th 2024 USA date

Every Time Nuclear World War 3 Almost Happened

Video length - 14:46

Edited 8 hours ago by KEVINAA

[cosmicway 1,323]

There was a time when nucleat war seemed ok - in so far as any sort of warfare seemed ok.
We are talking about Hiroshima-Nagasaki.
Truman did the dastardly thing not to warn the Japanese about Hiroshima.
By doing that he was not compromising the US strike capability in any way but he did n't do it.
All he had to do was send someone to the Japanese embassy in Lisbon and tell the Japanese all about it.
The Japs did not surrender after Hiroshima and there was the second dropping on Nagasaki, thus partially absolving the Americans but only partially.
Hiroshima was registered as an American war crime.
Then Mac Arthur wanted nukes to be used against North Korea but he was overruled and got sacked.
Yet even after the Soviet bomb there were some who believed nuclear weapons could be used to win a war.
Now it is understood that nuclear war is mutually assured destruction,

Suppose we are back in 1944 but with both the Americans and the Germans having nuclear bombs.
The operation Overlord was launched, Hitler was asleep and failed to give Runsted the order to mobilise, so Normandy was an initial success just like we know it happened.
But hey, he 's got the bomb.
So he fires some rockets and the five beaches Utah-Omaha-Gold-Juno-Sword go up in smoke together with all the allied troops and ships.
What then ?
But Eisenhower would know this in advance. He knows that all the preparations and the rubber soldiers to deceive the Germans into believing the invasion was to take place at Calais are useless.
What happens then to the invasion but of course what happens to the Germans at the same time ? Bombardier Harris was only too happy to send them his presents.

So what is a win strategy ?
There is a theory that whoever manages to take out the opponent's launching sites is the winner.
The Cuban missiles could indeed do something like that in 1962 - close proximity, shorter flight time.
But even so, Moscow woud burn and Leningrad and Sevastopol.

It looks pretty useless.
Do you know that Winston Churchill and Benito Mussolini had, in secret correspondence, agreed on something ?
Winston wrote to Banny and said "hey Benny, if you win I 'm your friend - you will arrange so I won't be prosecuted". Benny said "ok, but if you win then you as a friend will also arrange so I won't be prosecuted".
It was agreed but Winston could n't keep his promise because first the Swiss border guards and then the partizans made it impossible for Benny to reach safety.
Now what good will it do ?
Ok they can go underground but that's not much of a victory. Is it ?

Ultimately I regard Vlad now as a big mouthed bully.
I just would n't pay attention to his threats.
 

Edited 6 hours ago by cosmicway

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Biden Administration

Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.

Blinken told Congress, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting” aid, even though the U.S. Agency for International Development and others had determined that Israel had broken the law.

https://www.propublica.org/article/gaza-palestine-israel-blocked-humanitarian-aid-blinken

A relative holds the body of a 4-year-old Palestinian girl who died of malnutrition. The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. Credit:Ashraf Amra/Anadolu/Getty Images

 

The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

Prior to his report, USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

Lifesaving food was stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an Israeli port, including enough flour to feed about 1.5 million Palestinians for five months, according to the memo. But in February the Israeli government had prohibited the transfer of flour, saying its recipient was the United Nations’ Palestinian branch that had been accused of having ties with Hamas.

Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death — likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.

The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.

USAID, which is led by longtime diplomat Samantha Power, said the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” according to the memo. It also acknowledged Hamas had played a role in the humanitarian crisis. USAID, which receives overall policy guidance from the secretary of state, is an independent agency responsible for international development and disaster relief. The agency had for months tried and failed to deliver enough food and medicine to a starving and desperate Palestinian population.

It is, USAID concluded, “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”

In response to detailed questions for this story, the State Department said that it had pressured the Israelis to increase the flow of aid. “As we made clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian assistance,” a spokesperson wrote. “Israel subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”

Government experts and human rights advocates said while the State Department may have secured a number of important commitments from the Israelis, the level of aid going to Palestinians is as inadequate as when the two determinations were reached. “The implication that the humanitarian situation has markedly improved in Gaza is a farce,” said Scott Paul, an associate director at Oxfam. “The emergence of polio in the last couple months tells you all that you need to know.”

The USAID memo was an indication of a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel. In March, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians.

Lew acknowledged that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance,]” according to a copy of his cable obtained by ProPublica. But he recommended continuing to provide military assistance because he had “assessed that Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede U.S. provided or supported” shipments of food and medicine.

Lew said Israeli officials regularly cite “overwhelming negative Israeli public opinion against” allowing aid to the Palestinians, “especially when Hamas seizes portions of it and when hostages remain in Gaza.” The Israeli government did not respond to a request for comment but has said in the past that it follows the laws of war, unlike Hamas.

In the months leading up to that cable, Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four U.S. officials familiar with the embassy operations but, like others quoted in this story, not authorized to speak about them. “No other nation has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew responded to subordinates at the time, according to two of the officials, who said the comments drew widespread consternation.

“That put people over the edge,” one of the officials told ProPublica. “He’d be a great spokesperson for the Israeli government.”

A second official said Lew had access to the same information as USAID leaders in Washington, in addition to evidence collected by the local State Department diplomats working in Jerusalem. “But his instincts are to defend Israel,” said a third official.

“Ambassador Lew has been at the forefront of the United States’ work to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, as well as diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would secure the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict,” the State Department spokesperson wrote.

The question of whether Israel was impeding humanitarian aid has garnered widespread attention. Before Blinken’s statement to Congress, Reuters reported concerns from USAID about the death toll in Gaza, which now stands at about 42,000, and that some officials inside the State Department, including the refugees bureau, had warned him that the Israelis’ assurances were not credible. The existence of USAID’s memo, Lew’s cable and their broad conclusions were also previously reported.

But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy — along with Lew’s decision to undermine them — reveal new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.

Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress, resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.

“That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”

The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.

“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”

Aid trucks wait in Egypt at the border with Gaza on Sept. 9. Credit:AFP/Getty Images

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

The U.S. gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year as a baseline and significantly more during wartime — money the Israelis use to buy American-made bombs and equipment. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other partners can use that money.

One of them is the Foreign Assistance Act. The humanitarian aid portion of the law is known as 620I, which dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia during the 1990s. That part of the law has never been widely implemented. But this year, advocacy groups and some Democrats in Congress brought it out of obscurity and called for Biden to use 620I to pressure the Israelis to allow aid freely into Gaza.

In response, the Biden administration announced a policy called the National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20, to require the State Department to vet Israel’s assurances about whether it was blocking aid and then report its findings to lawmakers. If Blinken determined the Israelis were not facilitating aid and were instead arbitrarily restricting it, then the government would be required by the law to halt military assistance.

Blinken submitted the agency’s official position on May 10, siding with Lew, which meant that the military support would continue.

In a statement that same day, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized the administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements of NSM-20.”

“Whether or not Israel is at this moment complying with international standards with respect to facilitating humanitarian assistance to desperate, starving citizens may be debatable,” Van Hollen said. “What is undeniable — for those who don’t look the other way — is that it has repeatedly violated those standards over the last 7 months.”

As of early March, at least 930 trucks full of food, medicine and other supplies were stuck in Egypt awaiting approval from the Israelis, according to USAID’s memo.

The officials wrote that the Israeli government frequently blocks aid by imposing bureaucratic delays. The Israelis took weeks or months to respond to humanitarian groups that had submitted specific items to be approved for passage past government checkpoints. Israel would then often deny those submissions outright or accept them some days but not others. The Israeli government “doesn’t provide justification, issues blanket rejections, or cites arbitrary factors for the denial of certain items,” the memo said.

Israeli officials told State Department attorneys that the Israeli government has “scaled up its security check capacity and asserted that it imposes no limits on the number of trucks that can be inspected and enter Gaza,” according to a separate memo sent to Blinken and obtained by ProPublica. Those officials blamed most of the holdups on the humanitarian groups for not having enough capacity to get food and medicine in. USAID and State Department experts who work directly with those groups say that is not true.

In separate emails obtained by ProPublica, aid officials identified items in trucks that were banned by the Israelis, including emergency shelter gear, solar lamps, cooking stoves and desalination kits, because they were deemed “dual use,” which means Hamas could co-opt the materials. Some of the trucks that were turned away had also been carrying American-funded items like hygiene kits, the emails show.

In its memo to Blinken, USAID also cited numerous publicly reported incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by Israeli airstrikes even sometimes after they had shared their locations with the IDF and received approval, a process known as “deconfliction.” The Israeli government has maintained that most of those incidents were mistakes.

USAID found the Israelis often promised to take adequate measures to prevent such incidents but frequently failed to follow through. On Nov. 18, for instance, a convoy of aid workers was trying to evacuate along a route assigned to them by the IDF. The convoy was denied permission to cross a military checkpoint — despite previous IDF authorization.

Then, while en route back to their facility, the IDF opened fire on the aid workers, killing two of them.

Inside the State Department and ahead of Blinken’s report to Congress, some of the agency’s highest-ranking officials had a separate exchange about whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. ProPublica obtained an email thread documenting the episode.

On April 17, a Department of Defense official reached out to Mira Resnick, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who has been described as the agency’s driving force behind arms sales to Israel and other partners this year. The official alerted Resnick to the fact that there was about $827 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars sitting in limbo.

Resnick turned to the Counselor of the State Department and said, “We need to be able to move the rest of the” financing so that Israel could pay off bills for past weapons purchases. The financing she referenced came from American tax dollars.

The counselor, one of the highest posts at the agency, agreed with Resnick. “I think we need to move these funds,” he wrote.

But there was a hurdle, according to the agency’s top attorney: All the relevant bureaus inside the State Department would need to sign off on and agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments. “The principal thing we would need to see is that no bureau currently assesses that the restriction in 620i is triggered,” Richard Visek, the agency’s acting legal adviser, wrote.

The bureaus started to fall in line. The Middle East and human rights divisions agreed and determined the law hadn’t been triggered, “in light of Netanyahu’s commitments and the steps Israel has announced so far,” while noting that they still have “significant concerns about Israeli actions.”

By April 25, all had signed off but one. The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration was the holdout. That was notable because the bureau had among the most firsthand knowledge of the situation after months of working closely with USAID and humanitarian groups to try to get food and medicine to the Palestinians.

“While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted,” an official in the bureau wrote to the group.

It was a potentially explosive stance to take. One of Resnick’s subordinates in the arms transfer bureau replied and asked for clarification: “Is PRM saying 620I has been triggered for Israel?”

Yes, replied Julieta Valls Noyes, its assistant secretary, that was indeed the bureau’s view. In her email, she cited a meeting from the previous day between Blinken’s deputy secretary and other top aides in the administration. All the bureaus on the email thread had provided talking points to the deputy secretary, including one that said Israel had “failed to meet most of its commitments to the president.” (None of these officials responded to a request for comment.)

But, after a series of in-person conversations, Valls Noyes backed down, according to a person familiar with the episode. When asked during a staff meeting later why she had punted on the issue, Valls Noyes replied, “There will be other opportunities,” the person said.

The financing appears to have ultimately gone through.

Less than two weeks later, Blinken delivered his report to Congress.

 

https://www.propublica.org/article/israel-gaza-america-biden-administration-weapons-bombs-state-department

People take cover behind a wall as a building in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip is hit by an Israeli airstrike on May 12, 2023. Credit:Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images

 

In late January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 25,000 and droves of Palestinians fled their razed cities in search of safety, Israel’s military asked for 3,000 more bombs from the American government. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, along with other top diplomats in the Jerusalem embassy, sent a cable to Washington urging State Department leaders to approve the sale, saying there was no potential the Israel Defense Forces would misuse the weapons.

The cable did not mention the Biden administration’s public concerns over the growing civilian casualties, nor did it address well-documented reports that Israel had dropped 2,000-pound bombs on crowded areas of Gaza weeks earlier, collapsing apartment buildings and killing hundreds of Palestinians, many of whom were children. Lew was aware of the issues. Officials say his own staff had repeatedly highlighted attacks where large numbers of civilians died. Homes of the embassy’s own Palestinian employees had been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.

Still, Lew and his senior leadership argued that Israel could be trusted with this new shipment of bombs, known as GBU-39s, which are smaller and more precise. Israel’s air force, they asserted, had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians when using the American-made bomb and had “demonstrated an ability and willingness to employ it in [a] manner that minimizes collateral damage.”

While that request was pending, the Israelis proved those assertions wrong. In the months that followed, the Israeli military repeatedly dropped GBU-39s it already possessed on shelters and refugee camps that it said were being occupied by Hamas soldiers, killing scores of Palestinians. Then, in early August, the IDF bombed a school and mosque where civilians were sheltering. At least 93 died. Children’s bodies were so mutilated their parents had trouble identifying them.

Weapons analysts identified shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs among the rubble.

In the months before and since, an array of State Department officials urged that Israel be completely or partially cut off from weapons sales under laws that prohibit arming countries with a pattern or clear risk of violations. Top State Department political appointees repeatedly rejected those appeals. Government experts have for years unsuccessfully tried to withhold or place conditions on arms sales to Israel because of credible allegations that the country had violated Palestinians’ human rights using American-made weapons.

On Jan. 31, the day after the embassy delivered its assessment, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted an agency-wide town hall at an auditorium at the State Department headquarters where he fielded pointed questions from his subordinates about Gaza. He said the suffering of civilians was “absolutely gut wrenching and heartbreaking,” according to a transcript of the meeting.

“But it is a question of making judgments,” Blinken said of his agency’s efforts to minimize harm. “We started with the premise on October 7 that Israel had the right to defend itself, and more than the right to defend itself, the right to try to ensure that October 7 would never happen again.”

The embassy’s endorsement and Blinken’s statements reflect what many at the State Department have understood to be their mission for nearly a year. As one former official who served at the embassy put it, the unwritten policy was to “protect Israel from scrutiny” and facilitate the arms flow no matter how many human rights abuses are reported. “We can’t admit that’s a problem,” this former official said.

The embassy has even historically resisted accepting funds from the State Department’s Middle East bureau earmarked for investigating human rights issues throughout Israel because embassy leaders didn’t want to insinuate that Israel might have such problems, according to Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem. “In most places our goal is to address human rights violations,” Casey added. “We don’t have that in Jerusalem.”

Last week, ProPublica detailed how the government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance — the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugees bureau — concluded in the spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza and that weapons sales should be halted. But Blinken rejected those findings as well and, weeks later, told Congress that the State Department had concluded that Israel was not blocking aid.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken Credit:Evelyn Hockstein/Pool/AFP

The episodes uncovered by ProPublica, which have not been previously detailed, offer an inside look at how and why the highest ranking policymakers in the U.S. government have continued to approve sales of American weapons to Israel in the face of a mounting civilian death toll and evidence of almost daily human rights abuses. This article draws from a trove of internal cables, email threads, memos, meeting minutes and other State Department records, as well as interviews with current and former officials throughout the agency, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The records and interviews also show that the pressure to keep the arms pipeline moving also comes from the U.S. military contractors who make the weapons. Lobbyists for those companies have routinely pressed lawmakers and State Department officials behind the scenes to approve shipments both to Israel and other controversial allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia. When one company executive pushed his former subordinate at the department for a valuable sale, the government official reminded him that strategizing over the deal might violate federal lobbying laws, emails show.

The Biden administration’s repeated willingness to give the IDF a pass has only emboldened the Israelis, experts told ProPublica. Today, as Israel and Iran trade blows, the risk of a regional war is as great as it has been in decades and the cost of that American failure has become more apparent, critics charge.

“The reaffirmation of impunity has come swiftly and unequivocally,” said Daniel Levy, who served in the Israeli military before holding various prominent positions as a government official and adviser throughout the ’90s. He later became one of the founders of the advocacy group J Street and president of the U.S./Middle East Project.

Levy said there is virtually no threat of accountability for Israel’s conduct in Gaza, only “a certainty of carte blanche.” Or, as another State Department official said, “If there’s never any consequences for doing it, then why stop doing it?”

The war in Gaza has waged for nearly a year without signs of abating. There are at least 41,000 Palestinians dead, by local estimates. Israel says its actions have been legal and legitimate, unlike those of Hamas, which killed more than 1,100 Israelis, mostly civilians, on Oct. 7 and continues to hold dozens of hostages.

The U.S. has been a stalwart ally of Israel for decades, with presidents of both parties praising the country as a beacon of democracy in a dangerous region filled with threats to American interests.

In response to detailed questions from ProPublica, a State Department spokesperson sent a statement saying that arms transfers to any country, including Israel, “are done so in a deliberative manner with appropriate input” from other agencies, State Department bureaus and embassies. “We expect any country that is a recipient of U.S. security articles,” he added, “use them in full compliance with international humanitarian law, and we have several ongoing processes to examine that compliance.”

The spokesperson also said Lew has been at the forefront of ensuring “that every possible measure is taken to minimize impacts on civilians” while working on a cease-fire deal to secure “the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict.”

Israeli military leaders broadly defend their aerial campaign in Gaza as a “military necessity” to eradicate terrorists hiding among civilians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also publicly pressured the Biden administration to hasten arms transfers. “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job a lot faster,” he said in June.

ProPublica sent detailed questions to representatives of the Israeli government as well. A spokesperson said in a statement: “The article is biased and seeks to portray legitimate and routine contacts between Israel and the Embassy in Washington with State Department officials as improper. Its goal appears to be casting doubt on the security cooperation between two friendly nations and close allies.”

Weapons sales are a pillar of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Historically, the U.S. gives more money to Israel for weapons than it does to any other country. Israel spends most of those American tax dollars to buy weapons and equipment made by U.S. arms manufacturers.

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October 2023, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.” The air defenses that defend Israeli towns and cities — known as the Iron Dome — also depend largely on U.S. support.

There is little sign that either party is prepared to curtail U.S. weapons shipments. Vice President Kamala Harris has called for a cease-fire, lamented the death toll in Gaza and said she supported Palestinians’ right to self-determination as well as President Joe Biden’s decision to pause a shipment of 2,000 bombs in June. She has also echoed a refrain from previous administrations, pledging to “ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” Harris also said she had no intention of breaking with Biden’s Israel policy.

Republican nominee for president Donald Trump, who has described himself as the “best friend that Israel has ever had,” reportedly told donors that he supports Israel’s “war on terror” and promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. Trump was also recently a featured speaker at the Israeli-American Council’s summit, where he cast himself as the most pro-Israel choice in the coming election. “You have a big protector in me,” he told the crowd. “You don’t have a protector on the other side.”

People transport the body of a family member for burial following an Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza City on Aug. 10 that killed more than 90 people. Shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs was identified among the rubble. Credit:Omar al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images

The United States first began selling significant amounts of weapons to Israel in the early 1970s. Until then, Israel had relied on an array of home-grown and international purchases, notably from France, while the Soviet Union armed Israel’s adversaries. Over the past half-century, no country in the world has received more American military assistance than Israel.

The U.S. gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year and much more during wartime to help maintain its military edge in the region. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other countries can use the weapons they buy with U.S. money. The State Department must review and approve most of those large foreign military sales and is required to cut off a country if there is a pattern or clear risk of breaking international humanitarian law, like targeting civilians or blocking shipments of food to refugees. The department is also supposed to withhold U.S.-funded equipment and weapons from individual military units credibly accused of committing flagrant human rights violations, like torture.

Initially, a country makes a request and the local embassy, which is under the State Department’s jurisdiction, writes a cable called a “country team assessment” to judge the fitness of the nation asking for the weapons. This is just the beginning of a complex process, but it’s a crucial step because of the embassies’ local expertise.

Then, the bulk of that review is conducted by the State Department’s arms transfers section, known as the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, with input from other bureaus. For Israel and NATO allies, if the sale is worth at least $100 million for weapons or $25 million for equipment, Congress also gets final approval. If lawmakers try to block a sale, which is rare, the president can sidestep with a veto.

For years, Josh Paul, a career official in the State Department’s arms transfers bureau, reviewed arms sales to Israel and other countries in the Middle East. Over time, he became one of the agency’s most well-versed experts in arms sales.

Even before Israel’s retaliation for Oct. 7, he had been concerned with Israel’s conduct. On multiple occasions, he said, he believed the law required the government to withhold weapons transfers. In May 2021, he refused to approve a sale of fighter jets to the Israeli Air Force. “At a time the IAF are blowing up civilian apartment blocks in Gaza,” Paul wrote in an email, “I cannot clear on this case.” The following February, he wouldn’t sign off on another sale after Amnesty International published a report accusing Israeli authorities of apartheid.

In both cases, Paul later told ProPublica, his immediate superiors signed off on the sales over his objections.

“I have no expectation whatsoever of making any policy gains on this topic during this Administration,” he wrote at the time to a deputy assistant secretary.

During that same time period, Paul circulated a memo to some of the agency’s senior diplomats with recommendations to strengthen the arms sales review process, such as including input from human rights groups. Paul warned that the Biden administration’s new arms transfer policy — which prohibits weapons sales if it’s “more likely than not” the recipient will use them to intentionally attack civilian structures or commit other violations — would be “watered down” in practice.

“There is an inarguable significant risk of civilian harm in the sale of precision-guided munitions to Israel and Saudi Arabia,” the December 2021 memo said. The U.S. government has been historically unable to hold itself to its own standards, he wrote, “in the face of pressure from partners, industry, and perceived policy imperatives emerging from within the government itself.”

It does not appear that recommendations in the memo were implemented either. Paul resigned in protest over arms shipments to Israel last October, less than two weeks after the Hamas attack. It was the Biden administration’s first major public departure since the start of the war. By then, local authorities said Israeli military operations had killed at least 3,300 Palestinians in Gaza.

Internally, other experts began to worry the Israelis were violating human rights almost from the onset of the war as well. Middle East officials delivered at least six dissent memos to senior leaders criticizing the administration’s decision to continue arming Israel, according to those who had a role in drafting some of them. The content of several memos leaked to the media earlier this year. The agency says it welcomes input from the dissent channel and incorporates it into policymaking decisions.

In one previously unreported memo from November, a group of experts across multiple bureaus said they had not been consulted before several policy decisions about arms transfers immediately after Oct. 7 and that there was no effective vetting process in place to evaluate the repercussions of those sales.

That memo, too, seemed to have little impact. In the early stages of the war, State Department staff worked overtime, often after hours and through weekends, to process Israeli requests for more arms. Some in the agency have thought the efforts showed an inappropriate amount of attention on Israel.

The Israelis, however, felt different. In late December, just before Christmas, staff in the arms transfers bureau walked into their Washington, D.C., office and found something unusual waiting for them: cases of wine from a winery in the Negev Desert, along with personalized letters on each bottle.

The gifts were courtesy of the Israeli embassy.

Israeli wine sent to officials in the State Department’s arms transfers bureau in December Credit:Obtained by ProPublica

The State Department spokesperson said employees are allowed to accept gifts from foreign governments that fall below a certain dollar threshold. “To allege that any of their allegiances to the United States should be questioned is insulting,” he added. “The accusation that the Department of State is placing a disproportionate attention on Israel is inconsistent with the facts.”

The spokesperson for the Israeli government told ProPublica, “The embassy routinely sends individual bottles of wine (not cases) to many of its contacts to cordially mark the end of the year holidays.”

One month later, Lew delivered his endorsement of Israel’s request for the 3,000 precision GBU-39 bombs, which would be paid for with both U.S. and Israeli funds. Lew is a major figure in Democratic circles, having served in various administrations. He was President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and then became his treasury secretary. He has also been a top executive at Citigroup and a major private equity firm.

The U.S. defense attaché to Israel, Rear Adm. Frank Schlereth, signed off on the January cable as well. In addition to its assurances about the IDF, the memo cited the Israeli military’s close ties with the American military: Israeli air crews attend U.S. training schools to learn about collateral damage and use American-made computer systems to plan missions and “predict what effects their munitions will have on intended targets,” the officials wrote.

Portions of the January cable U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew sent to Washington urging the approval of an arms transfer Credit:Obtained by ProPublica

In the early stages of the war, Israel used American-made unguided “dumb” bombs, some likely weighing as much as 2,000 pounds, which many experts criticized as indiscriminate. But at the time of the embassy’s assessment, Amnesty International had documented evidence that the Israelis had also been dropping the GBU-39s, manufactured by Boeing to have a smaller blast radius, on civilians. Months before Oct. 7, a May 2023 attack left 10 civilians dead. Then, in a strike in early January this year, 18 civilians, including 10 children, were killed. Amnesty International investigators found GBU-39 fragments at both sites. (Boeing declined to comment and referred ProPublica to the government.)

At the time, State Department experts were also cataloging the effect the war has had on American credibility throughout the region. Hala Rharrit, a career diplomat based in the Middle East, was required to send daily reports analyzing Arab media coverage to the agency’s senior leaders. Her emails described the collateral damage from airstrikes in Gaza, often including graphic images of dead and wounded Palestinians alongside U.S. bomb fragments in the rubble.

“Arab media continues to share countless images and videos documenting mass killings and hunger, while affirming that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide and needs to be held accountable,” she reported in one early January email alongside a photograph of a dead toddler. “These images and videos of carnage, particularly of children getting repeatedly injured and killed, are traumatizing and angering the Arab world in unprecedented ways.”

  Portions of two email snapshots that senior leaders received early in the war Credit:Obtained, highlighted and pixelated by ProPublica

Rharrit, who later resigned in protest, told ProPublica those images alone should have prompted U.S. government investigations and factored into arms requests from the Israelis. She said the State Department has “willfully violated the laws” by failing to act on the information she and others had documented. “They can’t say they didn’t know,” Rharrit added.

Rharrit said her superiors eventually told her to stop sending the daily reports. (The State Department spokesperson said the agency is still incorporating perspectives from Arab media in regular internal analyses.)

Lew’s January cable makes no mention of the death toll in Gaza or the incidents of the Israelis dropping GBU-39s on civilians. Eight current and former State Department officials with expertise in human rights, the Middle East or arms transfers said the embassy’s assessment was an inadequate but not a surprising distillation of the administration’s position. “It’s an exercise in checking the boxes,” said Charles Blaha, a former human rights director at the agency.

The State Department declined to comment on the status of that request other than to say the U.S. has provided large amounts of GBU-39s to Israel multiple times in past years.

While the U.S. hoped that the smaller bombs would prevent unnecessary deaths, experts in the laws of war say the size of the bomb doesn't matter if it kills more civilians than the military target justifies. Lt. Col. Rachel E. VanLandingham, a retired officer with the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, said the IDF is legally responsible for doing all it can to know the risk to civilians ahead of any given strike and to avoid indiscriminately bombing densely populated areas like refugee camps and shelters. “It seems extremely plausible that they just disregarded the risk,” VanLandingham added. “It raises serious concerns and indicators of violating the law of war.”

Officials at the embassy in Jerusalem and in Washington said that similar concerns have been repeatedly brought to Lew, but his instincts were to defend Israel. In a separate cable obtained by ProPublica, he told Blinken and other leaders in Washington that “Israel is a trustworthy defense articles recipient” and his country team assessments ahead of past weapons sales have found that Israel’s “human rights record justifies the sale.”

Lew went even further and said the IDF’s system for choosing targets is so “sophisticated and comprehensive” that, by defense attaché Schlereth’s estimation, it “meets and often exceeds our own standard,” according to the cable. Two State Department officials told ProPublica that Lew and Schlereth have made similar statements during internal meetings. (The Navy did not make Schlereth available for an interview or respond to a list of questions.)

Early in the war, diplomats at the embassy also reported that Israel had dropped bombs on the homes of some of the embassy’s own staff, in addition to numerous other incidents involving civilians.

As to why Lew’s cables failed to reflect that kind of information, one official said, “My most charitable explanation is that they may not have had the time or inclination to critically assess the Israelis’ answers.”

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew Credit:Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images

In Israel’s New York consulate, weapons procurement officers occupy two floors, processing hundreds of sales each year. One former Israeli officer who worked there said he tried to purchase as many weapons as possible while his American counterparts tried just as hard to sell them. "It’s a business,” he said.

Behind the scenes, if government officials take too long to process a sale, lobbyists for powerful corporations have stepped in to apply pressure and move the deal along, ProPublica found.

Some of those lobbyists formerly held powerful positions as regulators in the State Department. In recent years, at least six high-ranking officials in the agency’s arms transfers bureau left their posts and joined lobbying firms and military contractors. Jessica Lewis, the assistant secretary of the bureau, resigned in July and took a job at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. The company is the largest lobbying firm in Washington, by lobbying revenue, and has represented the defense industry and countries including Saudi Arabia. (Lewis and the firm did not respond to requests for comment.)

Paul Kelly, who was the top congressional affairs official at the State Department between 2001 and 2005, during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, said he regularly “got leaned on” by the private sector to push sales to lawmakers for final approval. “They wouldn’t bribe or threaten me, but they would say … ‘When are you going to sign off on it and get it up to the Hill?’” he told ProPublica.

Three other State Department officials who currently or recently worked on military assistance said little has changed since then and companies that profit from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine frequently call or email. (The agency spokesperson told ProPublica that arms transfers are “not influenced by a particular company.”) The pressure also reaches lawmakers’ offices once they are notified of impending sales. Those measures include frequent phone calls and regular daytime meetings, according to an official familiar with the communications.

In some cases, the efforts appear to have drifted into questionable legal territory. In 2017, the Trump administration signed a $350 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, an extension of Obama’s former policy before he suspended some sales because of humanitarian concerns. For years, the Saudis and their allies used American-made jets and bombs to attack Houthi militant targets in Yemen, killing thousands of civilians in the process.

The following February, the State Department was weighing whether to approve a sale of precision-guided missiles produced by Raytheon to Saudi Arabia. A vice president at the company named Tom Kelly — the former principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s arms transfers bureau — emailed a former subordinate, Josh Paul. Kelly asked to set up a meeting with Paul and a colleague at the company to “talk through strategy” on pushing the sale through, according to an email of the exchange.

Paul wrote back that such a meeting could be illegal. “As you’ll recall from your time here, we’re restricted by the Anti-Lobbying Act from coordinating legislative strategies with outside groups,” he said. “However, I think the potential bumps in the road are relatively obvious.” Those bumps were a reference to recent media articles about mass civilian casualty incidents in Yemen.

“No worries,” Kelly responded. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

Kelly and Raytheon did not reply to requests for comment.

The State Department ultimately signed off on the sale.

[cosmicway 1,323]

THE WESTERN PRO-AMERICAN WORLD AND THE OTHERS
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Nothing is extraordinary good in the west.
We have:

Trump, brexit, Mitsotakis, Erdogan, the Vox party of Spain, Golden Dawnies

But what is beyond:

Africa: Cuthroaty dictators (unless I ',m mistaken and they 're all gone)
Middle East: Hamash-Hezbollah-Huthi-Iran
Asia: Afghanistan-Red China with their execution vans-Laos-Mianmar-Kim
Eastern Europe: Putin
South America: Venezuela (elsewhere relative peace)

We can safely say that the admirers of the beyond are Kim crowd.

Edited 3 hours ago by cosmicway

[Fulham Broadway 16,849]

2 hours ago, Vesper said:

Biden Administration

Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.

Blinken told Congress, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting” aid, even though the U.S. Agency for International Development and others had determined that Israel had broken the law.

https://www.propublica.org/article/gaza-palestine-israel-blocked-humanitarian-aid-blinken

A relative holds the body of a 4-year-old Palestinian girl who died of malnutrition. The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. Credit:Ashraf Amra/Anadolu/Getty Images

 

The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

Prior to his report, USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

Lifesaving food was stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an Israeli port, including enough flour to feed about 1.5 million Palestinians for five months, according to the memo. But in February the Israeli government had prohibited the transfer of flour, saying its recipient was the United Nations’ Palestinian branch that had been accused of having ties with Hamas.

Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death — likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.

The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.

USAID, which is led by longtime diplomat Samantha Power, said the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” according to the memo. It also acknowledged Hamas had played a role in the humanitarian crisis. USAID, which receives overall policy guidance from the secretary of state, is an independent agency responsible for international development and disaster relief. The agency had for months tried and failed to deliver enough food and medicine to a starving and desperate Palestinian population.

It is, USAID concluded, “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”

In response to detailed questions for this story, the State Department said that it had pressured the Israelis to increase the flow of aid. “As we made clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian assistance,” a spokesperson wrote. “Israel subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”

Government experts and human rights advocates said while the State Department may have secured a number of important commitments from the Israelis, the level of aid going to Palestinians is as inadequate as when the two determinations were reached. “The implication that the humanitarian situation has markedly improved in Gaza is a farce,” said Scott Paul, an associate director at Oxfam. “The emergence of polio in the last couple months tells you all that you need to know.”

The USAID memo was an indication of a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel. In March, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians.

Lew acknowledged that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance,]” according to a copy of his cable obtained by ProPublica. But he recommended continuing to provide military assistance because he had “assessed that Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede U.S. provided or supported” shipments of food and medicine.

Lew said Israeli officials regularly cite “overwhelming negative Israeli public opinion against” allowing aid to the Palestinians, “especially when Hamas seizes portions of it and when hostages remain in Gaza.” The Israeli government did not respond to a request for comment but has said in the past that it follows the laws of war, unlike Hamas.

In the months leading up to that cable, Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four U.S. officials familiar with the embassy operations but, like others quoted in this story, not authorized to speak about them. “No other nation has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew responded to subordinates at the time, according to two of the officials, who said the comments drew widespread consternation.

“That put people over the edge,” one of the officials told ProPublica. “He’d be a great spokesperson for the Israeli government.”

A second official said Lew had access to the same information as USAID leaders in Washington, in addition to evidence collected by the local State Department diplomats working in Jerusalem. “But his instincts are to defend Israel,” said a third official.

“Ambassador Lew has been at the forefront of the United States’ work to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, as well as diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would secure the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict,” the State Department spokesperson wrote.

The question of whether Israel was impeding humanitarian aid has garnered widespread attention. Before Blinken’s statement to Congress, Reuters reported concerns from USAID about the death toll in Gaza, which now stands at about 42,000, and that some officials inside the State Department, including the refugees bureau, had warned him that the Israelis’ assurances were not credible. The existence of USAID’s memo, Lew’s cable and their broad conclusions were also previously reported.

But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy — along with Lew’s decision to undermine them — reveal new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.

Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress, resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.

“That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”

The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.

“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”

Aid trucks wait in Egypt at the border with Gaza on Sept. 9. Credit:AFP/Getty Images

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

The U.S. gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year as a baseline and significantly more during wartime — money the Israelis use to buy American-made bombs and equipment. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other partners can use that money.

One of them is the Foreign Assistance Act. The humanitarian aid portion of the law is known as 620I, which dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia during the 1990s. That part of the law has never been widely implemented. But this year, advocacy groups and some Democrats in Congress brought it out of obscurity and called for Biden to use 620I to pressure the Israelis to allow aid freely into Gaza.

In response, the Biden administration announced a policy called the National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20, to require the State Department to vet Israel’s assurances about whether it was blocking aid and then report its findings to lawmakers. If Blinken determined the Israelis were not facilitating aid and were instead arbitrarily restricting it, then the government would be required by the law to halt military assistance.

Blinken submitted the agency’s official position on May 10, siding with Lew, which meant that the military support would continue.

In a statement that same day, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized the administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements of NSM-20.”

“Whether or not Israel is at this moment complying with international standards with respect to facilitating humanitarian assistance to desperate, starving citizens may be debatable,” Van Hollen said. “What is undeniable — for those who don’t look the other way — is that it has repeatedly violated those standards over the last 7 months.”

As of early March, at least 930 trucks full of food, medicine and other supplies were stuck in Egypt awaiting approval from the Israelis, according to USAID’s memo.

The officials wrote that the Israeli government frequently blocks aid by imposing bureaucratic delays. The Israelis took weeks or months to respond to humanitarian groups that had submitted specific items to be approved for passage past government checkpoints. Israel would then often deny those submissions outright or accept them some days but not others. The Israeli government “doesn’t provide justification, issues blanket rejections, or cites arbitrary factors for the denial of certain items,” the memo said.

Israeli officials told State Department attorneys that the Israeli government has “scaled up its security check capacity and asserted that it imposes no limits on the number of trucks that can be inspected and enter Gaza,” according to a separate memo sent to Blinken and obtained by ProPublica. Those officials blamed most of the holdups on the humanitarian groups for not having enough capacity to get food and medicine in. USAID and State Department experts who work directly with those groups say that is not true.

In separate emails obtained by ProPublica, aid officials identified items in trucks that were banned by the Israelis, including emergency shelter gear, solar lamps, cooking stoves and desalination kits, because they were deemed “dual use,” which means Hamas could co-opt the materials. Some of the trucks that were turned away had also been carrying American-funded items like hygiene kits, the emails show.

In its memo to Blinken, USAID also cited numerous publicly reported incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by Israeli airstrikes even sometimes after they had shared their locations with the IDF and received approval, a process known as “deconfliction.” The Israeli government has maintained that most of those incidents were mistakes.

USAID found the Israelis often promised to take adequate measures to prevent such incidents but frequently failed to follow through. On Nov. 18, for instance, a convoy of aid workers was trying to evacuate along a route assigned to them by the IDF. The convoy was denied permission to cross a military checkpoint — despite previous IDF authorization.

Then, while en route back to their facility, the IDF opened fire on the aid workers, killing two of them.

Inside the State Department and ahead of Blinken’s report to Congress, some of the agency’s highest-ranking officials had a separate exchange about whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. ProPublica obtained an email thread documenting the episode.

On April 17, a Department of Defense official reached out to Mira Resnick, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who has been described as the agency’s driving force behind arms sales to Israel and other partners this year. The official alerted Resnick to the fact that there was about $827 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars sitting in limbo.

Resnick turned to the Counselor of the State Department and said, “We need to be able to move the rest of the” financing so that Israel could pay off bills for past weapons purchases. The financing she referenced came from American tax dollars.

The counselor, one of the highest posts at the agency, agreed with Resnick. “I think we need to move these funds,” he wrote.

But there was a hurdle, according to the agency’s top attorney: All the relevant bureaus inside the State Department would need to sign off on and agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments. “The principal thing we would need to see is that no bureau currently assesses that the restriction in 620i is triggered,” Richard Visek, the agency’s acting legal adviser, wrote.

The bureaus started to fall in line. The Middle East and human rights divisions agreed and determined the law hadn’t been triggered, “in light of Netanyahu’s commitments and the steps Israel has announced so far,” while noting that they still have “significant concerns about Israeli actions.”

By April 25, all had signed off but one. The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration was the holdout. That was notable because the bureau had among the most firsthand knowledge of the situation after months of working closely with USAID and humanitarian groups to try to get food and medicine to the Palestinians.

“While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted,” an official in the bureau wrote to the group.

It was a potentially explosive stance to take. One of Resnick’s subordinates in the arms transfer bureau replied and asked for clarification: “Is PRM saying 620I has been triggered for Israel?”

Yes, replied Julieta Valls Noyes, its assistant secretary, that was indeed the bureau’s view. In her email, she cited a meeting from the previous day between Blinken’s deputy secretary and other top aides in the administration. All the bureaus on the email thread had provided talking points to the deputy secretary, including one that said Israel had “failed to meet most of its commitments to the president.” (None of these officials responded to a request for comment.)

But, after a series of in-person conversations, Valls Noyes backed down, according to a person familiar with the episode. When asked during a staff meeting later why she had punted on the issue, Valls Noyes replied, “There will be other opportunities,” the person said.

The financing appears to have ultimately gone through.

Less than two weeks later, Blinken delivered his report to Congress.

 

https://www.propublica.org/article/israel-gaza-america-biden-administration-weapons-bombs-state-department

People take cover behind a wall as a building in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip is hit by an Israeli airstrike on May 12, 2023. Credit:Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images

 

In late January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 25,000 and droves of Palestinians fled their razed cities in search of safety, Israel’s military asked for 3,000 more bombs from the American government. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, along with other top diplomats in the Jerusalem embassy, sent a cable to Washington urging State Department leaders to approve the sale, saying there was no potential the Israel Defense Forces would misuse the weapons.

The cable did not mention the Biden administration’s public concerns over the growing civilian casualties, nor did it address well-documented reports that Israel had dropped 2,000-pound bombs on crowded areas of Gaza weeks earlier, collapsing apartment buildings and killing hundreds of Palestinians, many of whom were children. Lew was aware of the issues. Officials say his own staff had repeatedly highlighted attacks where large numbers of civilians died. Homes of the embassy’s own Palestinian employees had been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.

Still, Lew and his senior leadership argued that Israel could be trusted with this new shipment of bombs, known as GBU-39s, which are smaller and more precise. Israel’s air force, they asserted, had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians when using the American-made bomb and had “demonstrated an ability and willingness to employ it in [a] manner that minimizes collateral damage.”

While that request was pending, the Israelis proved those assertions wrong. In the months that followed, the Israeli military repeatedly dropped GBU-39s it already possessed on shelters and refugee camps that it said were being occupied by Hamas soldiers, killing scores of Palestinians. Then, in early August, the IDF bombed a school and mosque where civilians were sheltering. At least 93 died. Children’s bodies were so mutilated their parents had trouble identifying them.

Weapons analysts identified shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs among the rubble.

In the months before and since, an array of State Department officials urged that Israel be completely or partially cut off from weapons sales under laws that prohibit arming countries with a pattern or clear risk of violations. Top State Department political appointees repeatedly rejected those appeals. Government experts have for years unsuccessfully tried to withhold or place conditions on arms sales to Israel because of credible allegations that the country had violated Palestinians’ human rights using American-made weapons.

On Jan. 31, the day after the embassy delivered its assessment, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted an agency-wide town hall at an auditorium at the State Department headquarters where he fielded pointed questions from his subordinates about Gaza. He said the suffering of civilians was “absolutely gut wrenching and heartbreaking,” according to a transcript of the meeting.

“But it is a question of making judgments,” Blinken said of his agency’s efforts to minimize harm. “We started with the premise on October 7 that Israel had the right to defend itself, and more than the right to defend itself, the right to try to ensure that October 7 would never happen again.”

The embassy’s endorsement and Blinken’s statements reflect what many at the State Department have understood to be their mission for nearly a year. As one former official who served at the embassy put it, the unwritten policy was to “protect Israel from scrutiny” and facilitate the arms flow no matter how many human rights abuses are reported. “We can’t admit that’s a problem,” this former official said.

The embassy has even historically resisted accepting funds from the State Department’s Middle East bureau earmarked for investigating human rights issues throughout Israel because embassy leaders didn’t want to insinuate that Israel might have such problems, according to Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem. “In most places our goal is to address human rights violations,” Casey added. “We don’t have that in Jerusalem.”

Last week, ProPublica detailed how the government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance — the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugees bureau — concluded in the spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza and that weapons sales should be halted. But Blinken rejected those findings as well and, weeks later, told Congress that the State Department had concluded that Israel was not blocking aid.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken Credit:Evelyn Hockstein/Pool/AFP

The episodes uncovered by ProPublica, which have not been previously detailed, offer an inside look at how and why the highest ranking policymakers in the U.S. government have continued to approve sales of American weapons to Israel in the face of a mounting civilian death toll and evidence of almost daily human rights abuses. This article draws from a trove of internal cables, email threads, memos, meeting minutes and other State Department records, as well as interviews with current and former officials throughout the agency, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The records and interviews also show that the pressure to keep the arms pipeline moving also comes from the U.S. military contractors who make the weapons. Lobbyists for those companies have routinely pressed lawmakers and State Department officials behind the scenes to approve shipments both to Israel and other controversial allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia. When one company executive pushed his former subordinate at the department for a valuable sale, the government official reminded him that strategizing over the deal might violate federal lobbying laws, emails show.

The Biden administration’s repeated willingness to give the IDF a pass has only emboldened the Israelis, experts told ProPublica. Today, as Israel and Iran trade blows, the risk of a regional war is as great as it has been in decades and the cost of that American failure has become more apparent, critics charge.

“The reaffirmation of impunity has come swiftly and unequivocally,” said Daniel Levy, who served in the Israeli military before holding various prominent positions as a government official and adviser throughout the ’90s. He later became one of the founders of the advocacy group J Street and president of the U.S./Middle East Project.

Levy said there is virtually no threat of accountability for Israel’s conduct in Gaza, only “a certainty of carte blanche.” Or, as another State Department official said, “If there’s never any consequences for doing it, then why stop doing it?”

The war in Gaza has waged for nearly a year without signs of abating. There are at least 41,000 Palestinians dead, by local estimates. Israel says its actions have been legal and legitimate, unlike those of Hamas, which killed more than 1,100 Israelis, mostly civilians, on Oct. 7 and continues to hold dozens of hostages.

The U.S. has been a stalwart ally of Israel for decades, with presidents of both parties praising the country as a beacon of democracy in a dangerous region filled with threats to American interests.

In response to detailed questions from ProPublica, a State Department spokesperson sent a statement saying that arms transfers to any country, including Israel, “are done so in a deliberative manner with appropriate input” from other agencies, State Department bureaus and embassies. “We expect any country that is a recipient of U.S. security articles,” he added, “use them in full compliance with international humanitarian law, and we have several ongoing processes to examine that compliance.”

The spokesperson also said Lew has been at the forefront of ensuring “that every possible measure is taken to minimize impacts on civilians” while working on a cease-fire deal to secure “the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict.”

Israeli military leaders broadly defend their aerial campaign in Gaza as a “military necessity” to eradicate terrorists hiding among civilians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also publicly pressured the Biden administration to hasten arms transfers. “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job a lot faster,” he said in June.

ProPublica sent detailed questions to representatives of the Israeli government as well. A spokesperson said in a statement: “The article is biased and seeks to portray legitimate and routine contacts between Israel and the Embassy in Washington with State Department officials as improper. Its goal appears to be casting doubt on the security cooperation between two friendly nations and close allies.”

Weapons sales are a pillar of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Historically, the U.S. gives more money to Israel for weapons than it does to any other country. Israel spends most of those American tax dollars to buy weapons and equipment made by U.S. arms manufacturers.

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October 2023, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.” The air defenses that defend Israeli towns and cities — known as the Iron Dome — also depend largely on U.S. support.

There is little sign that either party is prepared to curtail U.S. weapons shipments. Vice President Kamala Harris has called for a cease-fire, lamented the death toll in Gaza and said she supported Palestinians’ right to self-determination as well as President Joe Biden’s decision to pause a shipment of 2,000 bombs in June. She has also echoed a refrain from previous administrations, pledging to “ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” Harris also said she had no intention of breaking with Biden’s Israel policy.

Republican nominee for president Donald Trump, who has described himself as the “best friend that Israel has ever had,” reportedly told donors that he supports Israel’s “war on terror” and promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. Trump was also recently a featured speaker at the Israeli-American Council’s summit, where he cast himself as the most pro-Israel choice in the coming election. “You have a big protector in me,” he told the crowd. “You don’t have a protector on the other side.”

People transport the body of a family member for burial following an Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza City on Aug. 10 that killed more than 90 people. Shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs was identified among the rubble. Credit:Omar al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images

The United States first began selling significant amounts of weapons to Israel in the early 1970s. Until then, Israel had relied on an array of home-grown and international purchases, notably from France, while the Soviet Union armed Israel’s adversaries. Over the past half-century, no country in the world has received more American military assistance than Israel.

The U.S. gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year and much more during wartime to help maintain its military edge in the region. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other countries can use the weapons they buy with U.S. money. The State Department must review and approve most of those large foreign military sales and is required to cut off a country if there is a pattern or clear risk of breaking international humanitarian law, like targeting civilians or blocking shipments of food to refugees. The department is also supposed to withhold U.S.-funded equipment and weapons from individual military units credibly accused of committing flagrant human rights violations, like torture.

Initially, a country makes a request and the local embassy, which is under the State Department’s jurisdiction, writes a cable called a “country team assessment” to judge the fitness of the nation asking for the weapons. This is just the beginning of a complex process, but it’s a crucial step because of the embassies’ local expertise.

Then, the bulk of that review is conducted by the State Department’s arms transfers section, known as the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, with input from other bureaus. For Israel and NATO allies, if the sale is worth at least $100 million for weapons or $25 million for equipment, Congress also gets final approval. If lawmakers try to block a sale, which is rare, the president can sidestep with a veto.

For years, Josh Paul, a career official in the State Department’s arms transfers bureau, reviewed arms sales to Israel and other countries in the Middle East. Over time, he became one of the agency’s most well-versed experts in arms sales.

Even before Israel’s retaliation for Oct. 7, he had been concerned with Israel’s conduct. On multiple occasions, he said, he believed the law required the government to withhold weapons transfers. In May 2021, he refused to approve a sale of fighter jets to the Israeli Air Force. “At a time the IAF are blowing up civilian apartment blocks in Gaza,” Paul wrote in an email, “I cannot clear on this case.” The following February, he wouldn’t sign off on another sale after Amnesty International published a report accusing Israeli authorities of apartheid.

In both cases, Paul later told ProPublica, his immediate superiors signed off on the sales over his objections.

“I have no expectation whatsoever of making any policy gains on this topic during this Administration,” he wrote at the time to a deputy assistant secretary.

During that same time period, Paul circulated a memo to some of the agency’s senior diplomats with recommendations to strengthen the arms sales review process, such as including input from human rights groups. Paul warned that the Biden administration’s new arms transfer policy — which prohibits weapons sales if it’s “more likely than not” the recipient will use them to intentionally attack civilian structures or commit other violations — would be “watered down” in practice.

“There is an inarguable significant risk of civilian harm in the sale of precision-guided munitions to Israel and Saudi Arabia,” the December 2021 memo said. The U.S. government has been historically unable to hold itself to its own standards, he wrote, “in the face of pressure from partners, industry, and perceived policy imperatives emerging from within the government itself.”

It does not appear that recommendations in the memo were implemented either. Paul resigned in protest over arms shipments to Israel last October, less than two weeks after the Hamas attack. It was the Biden administration’s first major public departure since the start of the war. By then, local authorities said Israeli military operations had killed at least 3,300 Palestinians in Gaza.

Internally, other experts began to worry the Israelis were violating human rights almost from the onset of the war as well. Middle East officials delivered at least six dissent memos to senior leaders criticizing the administration’s decision to continue arming Israel, according to those who had a role in drafting some of them. The content of several memos leaked to the media earlier this year. The agency says it welcomes input from the dissent channel and incorporates it into policymaking decisions.

In one previously unreported memo from November, a group of experts across multiple bureaus said they had not been consulted before several policy decisions about arms transfers immediately after Oct. 7 and that there was no effective vetting process in place to evaluate the repercussions of those sales.

That memo, too, seemed to have little impact. In the early stages of the war, State Department staff worked overtime, often after hours and through weekends, to process Israeli requests for more arms. Some in the agency have thought the efforts showed an inappropriate amount of attention on Israel.

The Israelis, however, felt different. In late December, just before Christmas, staff in the arms transfers bureau walked into their Washington, D.C., office and found something unusual waiting for them: cases of wine from a winery in the Negev Desert, along with personalized letters on each bottle.

The gifts were courtesy of the Israeli embassy.

Israeli wine sent to officials in the State Department’s arms transfers bureau in December Credit:Obtained by ProPublica

The State Department spokesperson said employees are allowed to accept gifts from foreign governments that fall below a certain dollar threshold. “To allege that any of their allegiances to the United States should be questioned is insulting,” he added. “The accusation that the Department of State is placing a disproportionate attention on Israel is inconsistent with the facts.”

The spokesperson for the Israeli government told ProPublica, “The embassy routinely sends individual bottles of wine (not cases) to many of its contacts to cordially mark the end of the year holidays.”

One month later, Lew delivered his endorsement of Israel’s request for the 3,000 precision GBU-39 bombs, which would be paid for with both U.S. and Israeli funds. Lew is a major figure in Democratic circles, having served in various administrations. He was President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and then became his treasury secretary. He has also been a top executive at Citigroup and a major private equity firm.

The U.S. defense attaché to Israel, Rear Adm. Frank Schlereth, signed off on the January cable as well. In addition to its assurances about the IDF, the memo cited the Israeli military’s close ties with the American military: Israeli air crews attend U.S. training schools to learn about collateral damage and use American-made computer systems to plan missions and “predict what effects their munitions will have on intended targets,” the officials wrote.

Portions of the January cable U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew sent to Washington urging the approval of an arms transfer Credit:Obtained by ProPublica

In the early stages of the war, Israel used American-made unguided “dumb” bombs, some likely weighing as much as 2,000 pounds, which many experts criticized as indiscriminate. But at the time of the embassy’s assessment, Amnesty International had documented evidence that the Israelis had also been dropping the GBU-39s, manufactured by Boeing to have a smaller blast radius, on civilians. Months before Oct. 7, a May 2023 attack left 10 civilians dead. Then, in a strike in early January this year, 18 civilians, including 10 children, were killed. Amnesty International investigators found GBU-39 fragments at both sites. (Boeing declined to comment and referred ProPublica to the government.)

At the time, State Department experts were also cataloging the effect the war has had on American credibility throughout the region. Hala Rharrit, a career diplomat based in the Middle East, was required to send daily reports analyzing Arab media coverage to the agency’s senior leaders. Her emails described the collateral damage from airstrikes in Gaza, often including graphic images of dead and wounded Palestinians alongside U.S. bomb fragments in the rubble.

“Arab media continues to share countless images and videos documenting mass killings and hunger, while affirming that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide and needs to be held accountable,” she reported in one early January email alongside a photograph of a dead toddler. “These images and videos of carnage, particularly of children getting repeatedly injured and killed, are traumatizing and angering the Arab world in unprecedented ways.”

  Portions of two email snapshots that senior leaders received early in the war Credit:Obtained, highlighted and pixelated by ProPublica

Rharrit, who later resigned in protest, told ProPublica those images alone should have prompted U.S. government investigations and factored into arms requests from the Israelis. She said the State Department has “willfully violated the laws” by failing to act on the information she and others had documented. “They can’t say they didn’t know,” Rharrit added.

Rharrit said her superiors eventually told her to stop sending the daily reports. (The State Department spokesperson said the agency is still incorporating perspectives from Arab media in regular internal analyses.)

Lew’s January cable makes no mention of the death toll in Gaza or the incidents of the Israelis dropping GBU-39s on civilians. Eight current and former State Department officials with expertise in human rights, the Middle East or arms transfers said the embassy’s assessment was an inadequate but not a surprising distillation of the administration’s position. “It’s an exercise in checking the boxes,” said Charles Blaha, a former human rights director at the agency.

The State Department declined to comment on the status of that request other than to say the U.S. has provided large amounts of GBU-39s to Israel multiple times in past years.

While the U.S. hoped that the smaller bombs would prevent unnecessary deaths, experts in the laws of war say the size of the bomb doesn't matter if it kills more civilians than the military target justifies. Lt. Col. Rachel E. VanLandingham, a retired officer with the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, said the IDF is legally responsible for doing all it can to know the risk to civilians ahead of any given strike and to avoid indiscriminately bombing densely populated areas like refugee camps and shelters. “It seems extremely plausible that they just disregarded the risk,” VanLandingham added. “It raises serious concerns and indicators of violating the law of war.”

Officials at the embassy in Jerusalem and in Washington said that similar concerns have been repeatedly brought to Lew, but his instincts were to defend Israel. In a separate cable obtained by ProPublica, he told Blinken and other leaders in Washington that “Israel is a trustworthy defense articles recipient” and his country team assessments ahead of past weapons sales have found that Israel’s “human rights record justifies the sale.”

Lew went even further and said the IDF’s system for choosing targets is so “sophisticated and comprehensive” that, by defense attaché Schlereth’s estimation, it “meets and often exceeds our own standard,” according to the cable. Two State Department officials told ProPublica that Lew and Schlereth have made similar statements during internal meetings. (The Navy did not make Schlereth available for an interview or respond to a list of questions.)

Early in the war, diplomats at the embassy also reported that Israel had dropped bombs on the homes of some of the embassy’s own staff, in addition to numerous other incidents involving civilians.

As to why Lew’s cables failed to reflect that kind of information, one official said, “My most charitable explanation is that they may not have had the time or inclination to critically assess the Israelis’ answers.”

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew Credit:Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images

In Israel’s New York consulate, weapons procurement officers occupy two floors, processing hundreds of sales each year. One former Israeli officer who worked there said he tried to purchase as many weapons as possible while his American counterparts tried just as hard to sell them. "It’s a business,” he said.

Behind the scenes, if government officials take too long to process a sale, lobbyists for powerful corporations have stepped in to apply pressure and move the deal along, ProPublica found.

Some of those lobbyists formerly held powerful positions as regulators in the State Department. In recent years, at least six high-ranking officials in the agency’s arms transfers bureau left their posts and joined lobbying firms and military contractors. Jessica Lewis, the assistant secretary of the bureau, resigned in July and took a job at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. The company is the largest lobbying firm in Washington, by lobbying revenue, and has represented the defense industry and countries including Saudi Arabia. (Lewis and the firm did not respond to requests for comment.)

Paul Kelly, who was the top congressional affairs official at the State Department between 2001 and 2005, during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, said he regularly “got leaned on” by the private sector to push sales to lawmakers for final approval. “They wouldn’t bribe or threaten me, but they would say … ‘When are you going to sign off on it and get it up to the Hill?’” he told ProPublica.

Three other State Department officials who currently or recently worked on military assistance said little has changed since then and companies that profit from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine frequently call or email. (The agency spokesperson told ProPublica that arms transfers are “not influenced by a particular company.”) The pressure also reaches lawmakers’ offices once they are notified of impending sales. Those measures include frequent phone calls and regular daytime meetings, according to an official familiar with the communications.

In some cases, the efforts appear to have drifted into questionable legal territory. In 2017, the Trump administration signed a $350 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, an extension of Obama’s former policy before he suspended some sales because of humanitarian concerns. For years, the Saudis and their allies used American-made jets and bombs to attack Houthi militant targets in Yemen, killing thousands of civilians in the process.

The following February, the State Department was weighing whether to approve a sale of precision-guided missiles produced by Raytheon to Saudi Arabia. A vice president at the company named Tom Kelly — the former principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s arms transfers bureau — emailed a former subordinate, Josh Paul. Kelly asked to set up a meeting with Paul and a colleague at the company to “talk through strategy” on pushing the sale through, according to an email of the exchange.

Paul wrote back that such a meeting could be illegal. “As you’ll recall from your time here, we’re restricted by the Anti-Lobbying Act from coordinating legislative strategies with outside groups,” he said. “However, I think the potential bumps in the road are relatively obvious.” Those bumps were a reference to recent media articles about mass civilian casualty incidents in Yemen.

“No worries,” Kelly responded. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

Kelly and Raytheon did not reply to requests for comment.

The State Department ultimately signed off on the sale.

Not surprising Blinken is a Zionist his Grandad was one of the first Isaraeli settlers

and the 'peacemaker' sent by the US for Israel/Lebanon used to be in the IDF - you couldnt make it up

Bottom line the US could stop the Ukraine and Middle east slaughter tomorrow - but there's money in thar them weapons....

[cosmicway 1,323]

15 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Not surprising Blinken is a Zionist his Grandad was one of the first Isaraeli settlers

and the 'peacemaker' sent by the US for Israel/Lebanon used to be in the IDF - you couldnt make it up

Bottom line the US could stop the Ukraine and Middle east slaughter tomorrow - but there's money in thar them weapons....

By surrendering you can stop any war.