World
A Top U.K. Official Displayed the Terrifying Ignorance of the World’s Leaders on Gaza
Head of the political bureau of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, left, and the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, right, greet people as they attend an event held to mark the 30th anniversary of Hamas at Al Katiba Square on Dec. 14, 2017 in Gaza City.
Photo: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Do the people who run the world know the most basic facts about the world? This urgent question is raised by a recent column on the Israeli attack on Gaza by the British politician Ben Wallace, who, until a few months ago, was the United Kingdom’s defense minister. Terrifyingly enough, the answer appears to be no.
The problem is that Wallace places great significance on Hamas’s original 1988 charter, which is explicitly antisemitic and rejects any coexistence with Israel. But he doesn’t appear to know Hamas issued a new charter in 2017. In it, Hamas affirms that its “conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.” And, while the revised charter rejects the legitimacy of Zionism, it accepts “the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.” This reference to the lines of June 4, 1967 — before Israel captured the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War — is regarded as accepting the existence of Israel within the borders it had at that time.
This is not some arcane knowledge available to but a few. You could have learned about it by reading any newspaper at the time, such as, for instance, The Telegraph — the publication that ran Wallace’s column.
Wallace’s failure to cite Hamas’s prevailing charter is especially irksome because his overall point is completely reasonable. He references the aftermath of 1972’s Bloody Sunday, when British troops in Northern Ireland killed 14 demonstrators, and writes, “As sure as night follows day, history shows us that radicalisation follows oppression.” Now, Wallace says, Israel is on the same path, and its “tactics will fuel the conflict for another 50 years. … All the action will have achieved is the extinction, not of the extremists, but the voice of the moderate Palestinians who do want a two-state solution.”
However, Wallace adds that “[Hamas’s] charter reads like the constitution of a jihadist Salafi organisation. It is anti-Semitic and anti-democratic. It isn’t interested in peaceful co-existence with Israel, or Egypt, for that matter.” Moreover, “You can’t have a ceasefire with Hamas unless they are prepared to declare one; even then they would have to pledge to modify their charter to do so.”
Given Wallace’s wording, it’s unlikely that he was being consciously deceptive in his failure to note the 2017 revision; he almost certainly does not know that it exists. (Wallace is still in the British Parliament, and his Westminster office passed along questions about this to him, but he did not respond.)
This is significant for two reasons.
First, Hamas’s prevailing charter — i.e., the 2017 one — does not pose some insurmountable barrier to a two-state solution and peace. Moreover, while it’s unpopular to point this out, Hamas leaders have signaled a willingness to accept a two-state solution on many occasions. In 2009, the United States Institute of Peace, a think tank funded by the federal government, concluded that “Hamas has been carefully and consciously adjusting its political program for years and has sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel.” It’s easy to point to the vicious October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas and say it was obviously never willing to accept a two-state solution. However, the harsh truth is that the attacks and the Israeli response have increased U.S. interest in the establishment of a Palestinian state. It’s possible that parts of Hamas do in fact want a two-state solution, and understand us better than we understand ourselves.
Second, we have to accept that many of the people at the top of the world’s power structures simply have no idea what they’re talking about. Jimmy Carter once wrote that he wished that he had learned the history of U.S. aggression in Central America before he became president; the people of Central America probably wish that too.
Israel’s War on Gaza
Likewise, Palestinians would be happier if people like Wallace, whose tenure as the U.K.’s defense minister lasted four years, could achieve a Wikipedia-level knowledge of their history. For extra credit, Wallace could even learn the basics of the Likud party, currently chaired by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Its original 1977 party platform declares that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
But, of course, there is no pressure on Wallace and his ilk to become acquainted with facts. All the pressure pushes them in the other direction. For instance, for his banal observations of reality about oppression breeding radicalization, Wallace has been accused of potentially “stoking antisemitic hate.”
It’s distressing to have to point out these facts about Hamas, which is, from any secular, progressive perspective, unsavory in the extreme. But while no one has to defend Hamas, it’s important to defend reality. We desperately need the people in charge to understand what it is, so at least they won’t destroy the world by accident.
The post A Top U.K. Official Displayed the Terrifying Ignorance of the World’s Leaders on Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.
Joe Biden Abstains From Watered-Down U.N. Gaza Resolution, Then Takes Credit Anyway
An estimated 570,000 people in the Gaza Strip are now starving. Three-quarters of the territory’s 36 hospitals are closed. The remaining nine, all in southern Gaza, are “partially functional.” The shuttered hospitals in the north are serving as impromptu shelters for some of the 85 percent of Palestinians in Gaza who have been displaced, but did not trek south to escape the ravages of Israel’s ground invasion. Beyond an estimated death toll of 20,000, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, a devastating 355,000 are suffering from infectious diseases as conditions in the territory worsen.
Amid all of this suffering, President Joe Biden delayed a United Nations vote for humanitarian aid to Gaza at least eight times, watering it down until he felt satisfied enough to not veto it.
The vote is on a U.N. Security Council proposal, put forward by the United Arab Emirates and repeatedly whittled down just for Biden, that calls for limiting the hostilities in Gaza and expanding aid distribution. Officials reportedly crafted the resolution in such a way that it would be “tolerable” enough for the Biden administration to avoid a veto. The U.S. has long been Israel’s guarantor at the Security Council, using its veto as a permanent member of the council to block almost every measure critical of Israel.
For Biden, the preemptive concessions were not enough, and he continued to delay the UAE resolution. The main sticking points for Biden were the resolution’s use of the word “cessation” in a call to end fighting and on allowing an independent inspection of aid going into Gaza, rather than the Israel-administered checks that have slowed aid shipments to a crawl.
As negotiations edged into Thursday evening, the vote was kicked once again, to Friday — but not without reward for Biden. He was able to force out language that does not establish a mechanism for U.N. inspection of aid, nor call for the “suspension of hostilities.”
On Friday, the fateful vote was finally held — after the U.S. first vetoed a Russian amendment to restore the resolution’s originally stronger language for a “suspension.” Indeed, the 15 member nations instead voted on a resolution calling for “the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities.” The resolution passed, 13-0-2. Russia abstained out of frustration. The United States abstained, even after getting what it wanted.
Nevertheless, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield delivered remarks celebrating the passage, as if she hadn’t just voted to abstain from the resolution on behalf of Biden.
“This was tough, but we got there,” she began. “Since the start of this conflict, the United States has worked tirelessly to alleviate this humanitarian crisis … to push for the protection of innocent civilians and humanitarian workers and to work towards a lasting peace. Today’s votes bolsters those efforts.”
US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield celebrates the passage of the UN aid & hostage release resolution, even though Biden forced it to be watered down & the US did not vote in favor of it:
"Today this council provided a glimmer of hope amongst a sea of unimaginable suffering." pic.twitter.com/spiJddKCIj— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) December 22, 2023
“Biden is effectively running war crimes management for the Israelis.”
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, says the appeasement of Biden has made the resolution increasingly meaningless. “These changes would ensure that Israel’s slaughter in Gaza continues while minimizing the U.N.’s insight into what increasingly appears to be a genocide,” he told The Intercept. “This is Biden’s contribution to the resolution. Biden is effectively running war crimes management for the Israelis.”
In past days, Israeli forces allegedly bulldozed sick and injured civilians outside a hospital; were accused by the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem of besieging a church, killing a mother and daughter with sniper fire; said by the U.N. to have summarily executed at least 11 Palestinians; killed three of their own country’s hostages in Gaza, who were shirtless and waving white flags; bombed a maternity ward; and killed numerous journalists.
Israel’s War on Gaza
With or without the concessions to Biden, the resolution takes less of a hard line against Israel’s assault than two previous resolutions at the U.N. — both opposed by the U.S. Two weeks ago, the U.S. blocked a Security Council call for an immediate ceasefire and hostage release; the resolution nearly passed, until the U.S. veto. Instead, that same day, the Biden administration approved the sale of 14,000 shells for Israeli tanks worth $106.5 million, to be delivered immediately, without congressional approval.
Days later, a similar U.N. resolution, this one in the General Assembly, which doesn’t have the power to take binding positions, passed 153-10; the U.S. was one of 10 nations, including several vassal states and Israel, to vote against it.
The latest, watered-down resolution was designed from the outset not to gain U.S. support but simply to win its abstention, avoiding the veto. Even still, Biden wouldn’t play ball. In fact, as negotiations have been ongoing, the administration has been busy throwing wrenches elsewhere. State Department officials are apparently trying to block a conference about Israeli violations of the Geneva Conventions.
And the U.S. was one of four nations to vote against a resolution on Tuesday that affirmed the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and emphasized achieving “a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement between the Palestinian and Israeli sides.” The resolution passed 172-4.
The United States remains committed to the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and to self-determination.
The actions of Hamas terrorists don’t take that right away.— President Biden (@POTUS) October 24, 2023
Though the U.S. expresses concern about civilian harm in Gaza, Israel appears to have done little to heed American warnings. The result, said some analysts, is that the U.S. is isolating itself from the world even as it maintains no leverage on Israel.
“You claim to be saying to the Israelis, ‘We want to see a different way of conducting this operation,’” said Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former Israeli negotiator. “And at the same time, you’re providing the weapons, offering the diplomatic cover, watering down resolutions, vetoing resolutions, with no questions asked.”
“I think it’s so demeaning, the position they’re putting themselves in,” Levy told The Intercept. “The world is watching.”
While Biden’s strong support for Israel is in line with the pro-Israel consensus in Washington, poll after poll has shown a staying majority of Americans supporting a ceasefire, including most Democrats. On the question of sending more aid to Israel — as Biden has proposed — a recent poll found Americans opposed, 46 to 45, a 16-point hike in opposition in one month.
Even on Capitol Hill, Democrats are increasingly turning against the Israeli assault on Gaza as the destruction continues with no clear war aim. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has, like Biden, echoed Israel advocates’ talk of the country’s “right to defend itself” since the war started on October 7, but this week urged the U.S. to vote “YES” on the latest U.N. resolution. (The next day, Sanders modified his language to demand the U.S. “not veto a reasonable resolution to stop the hostilities.”) Republican hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina also conceded this week that Israel could do more to limit civilian deaths.
Also this week, six moderate House Democrats known for their national security backgrounds sent a letter to Biden, expressing their concern for Israel’s military strategy and the civilians they have killed. “We have dedicated our lives to national security and believe our nation’s values are a source of credibility and power,” Reps. Jason Crow, Mikie Sherrill, Chrissy Houlahan, Seth Moulton, Abigail Spanberger, and Elissa Slotkin wrote. “We know from personal and often painful experience that you can’t destroy a terror ideology with military force alone. And it can, and in fact, make it worse.”
I'm calling on the Biden Administration to use all of our nation's leverage to shift the Israeli military's strategy in defending itself against Hamas. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unacceptable and not in line with American interests. pic.twitter.com/w7niHo955F
— Chrissy Houlahan (@RepHoulahan) December 19, 2023
Meanwhile, Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, like many of his political rivals, holds no brief for Biden and would likely welcome a return of Donald Trump, who frequently acquiesced to Israel’s demands without even Biden’s grumbling.
The resulting picture is one of Biden undermining his own campaign: alienating his base for a foreign ally likely to side with his GOP rival, and isolating the U.S. instead of rebuilding relationships post-Trump.
Levy, the former Israeli negotiator, said the repeated moves at the U.N. against worldwide opinion stood in sharp contrast to Biden’s claim to restore U.S. prestige abroad. “You can’t do both,” Levy said. “You can’t claim the mantle of the upholder of an international order and be its primary underminer at the same time.”
Update: December 22, 2023
This article has been updated with the results of the Friday vote in the U.N. Security Council.
The post Joe Biden Abstains From Watered-Down U.N. Gaza Resolution, Then Takes Credit Anyway appeared first on The Intercept.
New York Times Doxxes Source Trafficked by Chinese Gang
The New York Times this week published the harrowing account of a man who thought he was applying for a translator job at an e-commerce company in Thailand, but was instead abducted and sold to a Chinese gang who forced him to work for a scam operation in Myanmar.
The Times, which withheld Neo Lu’s real name at his request for safety reasons, revealed identifying information about Lu to the public — and potentially the Chinese gangsters who took him hostage — by publishing what appears to be his passport number.
“Mr. Lu, who goes by the nickname Neo for the character in the Matrix movies, spoke to The New York Times on the condition that his full name not be used, for fear of retribution from the criminals,” reporter Isabelle Qian wrote in the Times story.
According to the account in the newspaper, Lu had provided the Times with photos of his time at the scam work camp, as well as copies of his travel documents to verify the authenticity of his situation. While the Times published several of photos of the camp, the paper also published a photo of a visa page that appears to be from Lu’s passport, publicly revealing his passport number.
Though the photo revealed what appeared to be Lu’s passport number alongside travel visa information, it did not display the story subject’s full name.
The photo did not appear in the online version of the article, but it was publicly accessible on the Times website through its specific web address.
After The Intercept contacted the paper, on the same day that the story was published, the Times removed the photo from its public website.
In response to a request for comment, Nicole Taylor, a spokesperson for the New York Times, said, “Mr. Lu supplied a range of photos and documents to The Times, which we used with his permission. We removed this photo out of an abundance of caution and within 24 hours of publication.”
Taylor added that “the source is aware and has not raised concerns.”
Other images that appeared to not be intended for public consumption were also subsequently removed from the Times’s website after The Intercept informed the Times of their presence. Among them was a graphic photo Lu apparently snapped of himself showing scars on his body, as well as a snippet of a text message conversation appearing to show a discussion between the gang and Lu’s parents regarding the ransom the gang had demanded for Lu.
Once the photos were removed, the old image URLs began displaying the message, “We’re sorry, we seem to have lost this page, but we don’t want to lose you,” the standard error message the Times displays when accessing an unavailable webpage.
The revelation of Lu’s passport number could potentially identify Lu to the gang that held him at the labor camp. According to the article, “The gangs often take away the abductees’ passports and let their visas expire” — meaning the gang could have access to Lu’s passport information.
The Times story feature art — at the top of the article — is a mosaic composed of various images apparently supplied by Lu, including interior and exterior shots of the work camp. The mosaic is composed of 10 images. In the original article, the images’ URLs had irregular numbering, jumping from four to 20. Though only 10 of those 20 images were utilized in the opening mosaic by the Times, it was possible to view any of the 20 images by changing the image number in the file name listed in the image’s URL.
The unused assets being publicly available is not new; the practice is particularly common with video game developers, with gamers routinely finding unused game assets in the file systems of video game releases. The issue has arisen with nongovernmental organizations as well.
This is not the first time the Times has unintentionally revealed personally identifiable information about story subjects. Last year, the Times revealed phone numbers of Russian soldiers and their family members who were being critical of Vladimir Putin and the war effort. The Times later went so far as to remove the news story from the website archival service the Wayback Machine; the paper has been actively antagonistic to having its site archived.
Software developers have automated tools to help them scan their source code to prevent inadvertently publicly revealing sensitive information. As a best practice in journalism, however, there is no substitute for human discretion when handling sensitive materials entrusted to a newsroom by an at-risk source.
The post New York Times Doxxes Source Trafficked by Chinese Gang appeared first on The Intercept.
Barring Speakers Under U.S. Sanctions Puts Ideas Off-Limits, Say Free Speech Advocates
A lawsuit filed Wednesday says the U.S. government violated the First Amendment when it prevented a U.S.-based organization from hosting people sanctioned by the U.S. as speakers at a conference earlier this year. The suit, if successful, could have far-reaching implications for placing federal limits on freedom of speech when sanctioned or otherwise designated people or groups are involved.
The complaint, filed by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, argues that the decision made by the Office of Foreign Assets Control could have consequences for public discourse, including whether news outlets could publish interviews with individuals designated under U.S. sanctions law.
For the lawyers bringing the suit, the current curtailment of speech based on sanctions amounts to the policing of thought.
“The question at the core of the case is what control the U.S. government has over the American mind and whether it can effectively insulate Americans from ideas and people who it decides are off-limits,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight Institute. “That is an extraordinarily dangerous authority.”
In January, the Foundation for Global Political Exchange, a U.S. nonprofit that organizes small-group discussions across the political spectrum in the Middle East, held an event in Beirut aimed at fostering political dialogue about Lebanon.
The Foundation sought to include five influential political figures in Lebanon who were either sanctioned by the U.S. government or were members of a designated organization. Two of the potential speakers were members of the Lebanese Parliament, one was a senior representative of the sanctioned Palestinian militant group Hamas, and two others were members of Hezbollah, which the U.S. government considers a terrorist organization but remains a major political party within Lebanon.
“The public gets to decide for itself which ideas to credit and which ones to reject. That is what the First Amendment is supposed to protect.”
Out of prudence, the Foundation informed OFAC, the agency that regulates sanctions, that some of the participants were on the sanctions list or affiliated with sanctioned groups. The agency was categorical in its response: Any event held by Americans with designated individuals was prohibited and risked civil or criminal penalties. OFAC claimed that inviting any of the five people — even those who were members of sanctioned organizations but not themselves listed as individuals — would violate the law by giving them “a platform for them to speak” that would provide a “service,” according to the lawsuit. (OFAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The lawsuit argues that OFAC has no legal authority to prevent Americans from engaging in conversation with people on the sanctions list. The Foundation’s event was specifically protected by legal and regulatory exemptions on the exchange of information and ideas, it claims.
“OFAC is assuming the authority to control whom Americans get to hear from and by extension what views Americans hold,” Anna Diakun, a staff attorney at the Knight Institute, told The Intercept. “But the public gets to decide for itself which ideas to credit and which ones to reject. That is what the First Amendment is supposed to protect.”
OFAC is part of the U.S. Treasury Department and administers and regulates sanctions against individuals and organizations abroad. U.S. sanctions often shift based on political conditions. Given the Foundation’s mission to promote political dialogue, particularly in conflict-stricken regions, the decision to restrict the event in Beirut could be at odds with U.S. political goals, the suit argues.
“While the government sometimes has legitimate interests in imposing sanctions on groups that are hostile to the United States or engaged in human rights abuses,” the complaint states, “prohibiting the Foundation from engaging in political dialogue with designated individuals undermines rather than serves those interests.”
On its face, the case deals with the specific situation of an American organization hosting people on the U.S. sanctions list at events. But the lawsuit argues that OFAC’s decision could be applied to political speech more broadly, making it effectively illegal for Americans to speak with people out of favor with the U.S. government, including restricting journalists from publishing interviews with sanctioned individuals, which is often necessary when reporting on conflicts abroad.
“OFAC legal theory would allow it to criminalize journalists who want to engage with ideas and individuals that the U.S. government disfavors,” Abdo said. “That is a tool of autocracy, not democracy where people get to decide which ideas to engage with.”
The post Barring Speakers Under U.S. Sanctions Puts Ideas Off-Limits, Say Free Speech Advocates appeared first on The Intercept.
Industrial Killing of Civilians in Gaza Won’t Defeat the Armed Insurgency
An aerial view of a mass burial of Palestinians who were killed by Israeli attacks in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on Nov. 22, 2023.
Photo: Mohammad Fayq/Anadolu via Getty Images
Confronted with an endless list of well-documented Israeli war crimes, the Biden administration has responded with overwhelming support for a genocidal war of annihilation against the Palestinians of Gaza. For more than two months, the White House has engaged in a public campaign of gaslighting as it has feigned concern over the fate of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents while simultaneously maintaining the flow of weapons, intelligence, and political cover to an Israeli regime that has made clear its intent to “flatten” Gaza and force its intentionally dehumanized survivors into an ever-shrinking killing cage.
President Joe Biden, facing historically low popularity heading into the 2024 election, reportedly now wants Israel to move to a “less kinetic” phase of its war by early next year. This is simply the latest effort by the administration to recast the public narrative about its consistent support for slaughter.
State Terrorism
Ten weeks into this industrial-scale rampage, more than 25,000 Palestinians are dead, including nearly 10,000 children. Two dozen hospitals have been attacked by the U.S.-backed Israeli forces and some 300 health workers have been killed. Nearly 100 journalists have died under Israel’s bombs and attacks. Not even the Catholic Church in Gaza has been spared from Israel’s war crimes. On December 16, according to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Israeli snipers shot dead two Christian women taking shelter in the Holy Family church in Gaza, spurring Pope Francis to state bluntly that Israel is committing acts of terrorism.
Gazans have been systematically denied the most minimal vital necessities. International aid organizations, warning of starvation and the spread of infectious disease, have repeatedly begged for an immediate ceasefire. And it has been the U.S., and the U.S. alone, that has insured that this would not happen. “The United States and Israel have never been more determined and aligned in our shared values, our shared interests and our shared goals,” said Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as he stood alongside U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this week in Tel Aviv. “Our common enemies around the world are watching, and they know that Israel victory is the victory of the free world, led by the United States of America.”
Israel’s War on Gaza
A few days earlier, Gallant publicly preempted his private discussions with national security adviser Jake Sullivan, forcing him to stand, jaw clenched, before news cameras as Gallant portrayed the war as a joint U.S.–Israeli operation. “Thank you for being side by side with us in this effort,” Gallant told a stone-faced Sullivan in Tel Aviv, a visit the White House had portrayed, in part, as an effort to get Israel to wind down its large-scale operations in Gaza. “It will take and require a long period of time,” Gallant advised Sullivan in what looked like a forced reeducation session. “It will last more than several months.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to Sullivan’s visit by publicly thanking the U.S. for delivering more tank rounds for the war in Gaza and vetoing a U.N. ceasefire resolution. “Nothing will stop us,” he declared. “We are going on to the end, until victory, nothing less.” The whole affair, which came on the heels of Biden labeling Israel’s bombing of Gaza “indiscriminate,” played out like an Israeli-orchestrated public daring of the White House to pull support for the war.
Israel is well aware that if the White House truly wanted Israel to stop, it could do so by withholding all additional military assistance until the carnage ends. But the rationale for Biden’s refusal to demand a ceasefire, which a firm majority of Democrats want him to do, is not just born of total disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians who are cannon fodder for the big lie about this being an Israeli act of “self-defense.” Though the U.S. is likely to frame any “winding down” or temporary pause in the Israeli attempt to erase Gaza as a humanitarian endeavor, the reality is more complicated.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, left, and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant give a joint press conference in Tel Aviv on Dec. 18, 2023.
Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images
Military Failures
Both Biden and Netanyahu know what they dare not say in public: On a military level, things are not going well. Israel, a nuclear-armed nation state with modern weapons systems and intelligence capabilities and fully backed by the most powerful nation on Earth, is desperately struggling to achieve a meaningful tactical victory over the armed Palestinian guerrilla forces in Gaza.
Despite the vast resources Israel has dedicated to its propaganda effort, it is also flailing in its effort to defeat Hamas on that front. On a daily, sometimes hourly, basis, the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, and their allies in arms release videos showing successful attacks on Israeli armored vehicles and troop positions. The short films offer a glimpse into another side of this war, the one that Israel and the U.S. do not want the public to see. And the picture that emerges stands in stark contrast to the official Israeli narrative. Fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are engaged in urban combat and close-quarters firefights with Israeli forces, and they are inflicting heavy losses on them. They have also published a close-up video of Israeli soldiers in a makeshift tent camp inside Gaza that Hamas fighters filmed by discreetly popping up from tunnel hatches.
The spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, known by his nom de guerre Abu Obeida, has regularly released audio messages outlining his assessment of the ground war and challenging Israeli narratives. “The whole world sees how our fighters destroy and burn the enemy’s armored vehicles, killing the invading soldiers inside them,” he said in a recording released December 15. “The official figures of the dead and injured announced by the enemy’s army are undoubtedly untrue.” He praised his fighters for waging a battle against an enemy armed and supported “by the American administration, which is airlifting support to this entity as if it were fighting a great power among the world’s poles.”
An Israeli soldier exits a large tunnel near the border with Israel on Dec. 15, 2023, in northern Gaza Strip.
Photo: Amir Levy/Getty Images
The Israeli military recently published a video that purportedly depicts the work of a Hamas engineering team’s construction of a 4-kilometer section of underground tunnel near the Erez Crossing. It also published a video of what it said was Mohammed Sinwar, the brother of Hamas’s leader, driving in a car through the tunnel network. While Israel clearly released the videos in an effort to unmask the devious evil of Hamas, it actually revealed a level of tactical sophistication and preparedness seldom seen since the days of the Viet Cong. The IDF-published videos also inadvertently dramatized the dubiousness of Israel’s claims that it can flush with seawater hundreds of kilometers of tunnels equipped with massive water-sealed and blast-proof doors — not to mention the viability of engaging in close-combat tunnel warfare with Hamas.
The day after Israel published the tunnel videos, Hamas released its own video response. The group stated that the tunnel had been constructed exclusively for the October 7 attacks against the Israeli military installation near Erez. It featured clips of Gallant, the defense minister, touring the tunnels with Israeli soldiers, juxtaposed with footage from Hamas’s raid on the base two months ago. “You arrived late. … Mission had already been completed,” read a caption in English, Arabic and Hebrew.
Stories are beginning to appear more frequently in the Israeli press expressing concern about the steadily mounting death and injury toll of Israeli soldiers. These sentiments have intensified over the past week, following an ambush in Shujaiyeh that reportedly killed nine Israeli soldiers, as well as the revelation that IDF soldiers shot dead three Israeli hostages who were shirtless, waving a white flag, and speaking Hebrew. “The consensus of public support for Israel’s war is beginning to wane, as the two conditions on which it rests fade away: a clear purpose for the war and the understanding that victory is attainable,” wrote Israeli military analyst Amos Harel in Haaretz. “Broad public support for a ground incursion, which was strong in the aftermath of the Hamas massacre, is now being gradually mixed with concern and skepticism. Despite the expanding offensive and the enemy’s losses, we are approaching a dangerous phase of incremental advances,” he added. “The continued fighting in the current format will mean a steady trickle of news about soldiers dying.” As of December 19, Israel has officially acknowledged the deaths of 130 of its soldiers in Gaza.
There is no doubt that both Washington and Tel Aviv underestimated the military capacity of the Hamas-led armed resistance. It is one thing to snatch Palestinians off the streets of the West Bank and disappear them into a military court system, a practice Israel has perfected over the decades. It is quite another to defeat a well-armed insurgency that has spent decades building vast underground infrastructure beneath its own territory and training for this very moment.
Civil defense teams and Palestinians conduct search-and-rescue operations for the people in a building attacked by Israeli forces in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on Dec. 19, 2023.
Photo: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images
Bankrupt Strategies
Killing or capturing Hamas leader Yehia Sinwar or the head of the Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif, may give Israel political cover to declare a false victory, scenarios the Biden administration is eager to seize upon. Last week, a senior U.S. official hinted that the U.S. is actively participating in the hunt for these high-value targets, declaring that it is “safe to say” that Sinwar’s “days are numbered.” But the idea that armed resistance will be extinguished by killing top leaders of Hamas betrays the same pattern of wishful thinking that has permeated U.S. strategic thinking since 9/11. All of this suggests that rather than trying to end the suffering of Gazans, Biden is instead looking for an off-ramp that avoids solidifying the image of Israel as waging a gratuitous war that utterly failed to achieve its stated objectives.
The idea that armed resistance will be extinguished by killing Hamas leaders betrays the same pattern of wishful thinking that has permeated U.S. strategic thinking since 9/11.
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, in a column based on conversations with his insider circle of the D.C. elite, wrote that the U.S. has been contemplating a “day after” scenario that would see the deployment of a security force “composed primarily of Palestinians who aren’t affiliated with Hamas and are willing to cooperate with the Israeli troops still ringing the border. Ideally, this policing force would be bolstered by foreign troops, operating under a U.N. mandate.” Ignatius added, “Israeli commandos might stage raids back into the center of Gaza when they receive intelligence about high-value targets.”
This bankrupt thinking illustrates how little the U.S. cares about what, to Palestinians, is the central issue of the 75-year conflict: ending Israeli apartheid and achieving statehood. The fact that the administration is contemplating a plan to Palestinianize the occupation by using collaborators with the Israeli regime’s forces is straight out of the bankrupt “home-grown counterinsurgency” strategy the Bush administration sought to use to extract itself from the catastrophe it manufactured through its own invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is also reminiscent of the utterly failed Obama-era COIN strategy in Afghanistan.
Protesters in Los Angeles denounce the Biden administration’s support of Israel, which has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians so far in its war against Hamas in Gaza, on Dec. 8, 2023.
Photo: David McNew/Getty Images
The notion that the Palestinian Authority, a deeply unpopular pseudo-government that has utterly failed to defend the Palestinians who live under its area of responsibility in the occupied West Bank, could somehow operate with any credibility in Gaza is precisely the type of intellectual sludge that persistently oozes from Washington think tanks into the corridors of power. It has no more legitimacy than the farcical Dick Cheney-led plan two decades ago to install the discredited exile Ahmed Chalabi as the leader of a post-Saddam Iraq.
Such discussions about Gaza’s future, which exclude the actual residents of Gaza, dramatize the near-religious fervor that drives what can only be described as a firm American commitment to doing everything possible to avoid addressing the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people and their rights to self determination and self-defense.
Biden made his choice — and has continued to double down on it in the face of every fresh horror that has unfolded in Gaza. Whatever tale of victory he and Netanyahu want to spin when the intense period of wanton death and destruction “winds down,” Biden should never be permitted to escape the cold fact that he served as the arms dealer and most consequential public propagandist for a war of choice against an overwhelmingly defenseless civilian population. The responsibility for the blowback that will inevitably sprout from the killing fields of Gaza should be firmly affixed to Biden’s legacy.
The post Industrial Killing of Civilians in Gaza Won’t Defeat the Armed Insurgency appeared first on The Intercept.
Watch: A Conversation on the Horrors in Gaza With Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous
Israel is barring international reporters from entering Gaza — and systematically killing the Palestinian journalists who are the eyes and ears of the world, reporting from this Israeli-enforced killing cage.
Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill hosted a live conversation with independent journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous on Tuesday about the U.S. role in Israel’s scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza, the future of Palestinian resistance, and the urgent need for journalism that tells the truth about this crisis.
Kouddous has reported from inside Gaza; his work has appeared on Al Jazeera, Democracy Now!, and more. He’s also a co-producer of the Palestine Festival of Literature. His George Polk Award-winning documentary “The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh” helped expose the White House’s efforts to avoid a U.S. investigation after the prominent Palestinian American journalist was shot dead by Israeli forces.
The post Watch: A Conversation on the Horrors in Gaza With Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous appeared first on The Intercept.
Secret Pakistan Document Undermines Espionage Case Against Imran Khan
A crucial document from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, undermines a major plank in the high-profile prosecution of the country’s former prime minister, Imran Khan.
Khan remains behind bars while he faces trial for allegedly mishandling a secret document, known as a cypher, which the prosecution claims compromised the integrity of the encrypted communication system used by the state’s security apparatus. But according to an ISI analysis leaked to The Intercept, that claim is entirely false. Internally, the agency concluded that the leak of the text of a cypher could in no way compromise the integrity of the system, an assessment contrary to public claims made repeatedly by prosecutors.
The main charge against Khan relates to his handling of a diplomatic cable describing a key meeting in March 2022 between U.S. and Pakistani officials in Washington. Khan, while prime minister, had repeatedly alluded to the existence of a cypher that outlined U.S. pressure on Pakistan to remove him from power in a vote of no confidence. Though he never disclosed its full contents, at times, in public speeches, he quoted statements recorded in it from U.S. officials promising to reward Pakistan for his ouster. At one rally, Khan even waved what he said was the printed text of the document, without revealing its exact contents.
Prosecutors assert that Khan damaged Pakistani national security by exposing the text of this encrypted document, contents they say could potentially be used by rival intelligence agencies to crack the code of a wide range of other secret Pakistani communications. A criminal complaint against Khan alleges that he “compromised the entire cypher security system of the state and secret communication method of Pakistani missions abroad,” through his alleged mishandling of the cypher. The former prime minister faces up to 10 years in prison if found guilty under Pakistan’s Official Secrets Act and could face the death penalty if charged with treason in the case.
On August 9, 2023, The Intercept published the text of the cypher outlining U.S. pressure against Pakistan to remove Khan. Shortly afterward, Pakistan’s own intelligence agency issued an assessment addressing the very question of how damaging publishing such a text would be.
The internal conclusion of the ISI was crystal clear: No threat to Pakistan’s encryption existed.
Pakistan did not respond to a request for comment.
On August 11, two days after The Intercept story was published, an internal request for information was sent to the ISI by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The question at hand: Does the revelation of the plain text of such a cypher compromise the integrity of the system’s encryption? The response, filed by the Inter-Services Intelligence Secretariat under the heading ISI-Policy Matters, and titled “Breach of Crypto Security,” determined that contrary to the present charges against Khan, revealing the text of a cypher poses no risk to the government’s encrypted communications network. “If plain text of an encrypted message (cryptogram) … is leaked it has no effect on security of encryptor,” the analysis, which was filed on August 23, concludes. “Leakage of a plain text message does not compromise the algorithm.”
Concern about the security of an encryption system is not entirely unfounded. Some encryption systems can theoretically be compromised by what is known as a “plaintext attack,” in which an attacker has access to a copy of both the plain and encrypted versions of a document’s text and can use the two versions to determine the encryption system.
But the spy agency’s conclusion in the days following The Intercept’s publication of the secret cypher was that the disclosure of the short piece of text alone — without the encryption key — did not pose a risk.
“If plain text of an encrypted message (cryptogram) using DTE is leaked, it has no effect on security of the encryptor due to following,” the analysis reads, referring to “an offline encryption device.”
“The encryption algorithm,” it goes on to explain, “is designed with an assumption that the plain/cipher text pairs and algorithms are known to the adversary, the security lies in the secrecy of the key. Therefore leakage of a plain text message does not compromise the algorithm.”
According to the agency’s own analysis, to launch a plaintext attack an adversary would need a minimum of 2256 bits of “plain/cipher text data encrypted with the same key” to figure it out. That would be an amount of text that exceeds not just the length of Khan’s diplomatic cable, but also the total amount of digital storage space available worldwide. In other words, there was never any risk whatsoever that publishing the contents of the cypher could allow an adversary to crack the state’s encryption system.
“Not Compromised”
The cypher published by The Intercept deals with a March 7, 2022, meeting between a senior State Department official, Donald Lu, and Pakistan’s then-ambassador to the U.S. The document describes a tense meeting in which State Department officials expressed their concerns about Khan’s stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and threatened that Pakistan could face isolation from the U.S. and European allies. According to the cable, Lu tells the Pakistani ambassador that “all will be forgiven” if Khan were removed from power by a vote of no confidence.
The day after the meeting described in the cypher, on March 8, 2022, Khan’s opponents in Parliament moved forward with a key procedural step toward a no-confidence vote against him — a vote largely seen as having been orchestrated by Pakistan’s powerful military establishment. A month later, Khan was ousted from power, time during which he tried to blow the whistle on U.S. involvement in his removal.
Khan had said that the meeting detailed in the cypher showed proof of a U.S.-led conspiracy against his government. The text of the document published in August 2023 by The Intercept broadly validated his account of that meeting, with portions of it matching word for word what little Khan had quoted from it. (The cypher was leaked to The Intercept by a source within Pakistan’s military, not by Khan.)
Khan, according to prosecutors, did not declassify the cypher document while in office, even as it had become a major part of his battle for political survival. At several points while he was in power, representatives of other branches of the government expressed opposition to declassifying the document, including at a critical March 30 cabinet meeting, arguing that revealing the text of the document would compromise Pakistan’s national security.
Khan’s former foreign secretary echoed these claims, saying that Khan’s government discussed revealing the full text to quiet critics who said he was fabricating the U.S. pressure, but had been informed that doing so might endanger Pakistan’s encrypted communication systems. A probe by Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency this November into Khan’s handling of the document also cited a former aide to the prime minister, Azam Khan, who reportedly told investigators that he warned that the “cipher was a decoded secret document and its contents could neither be disclosed nor be discussed in public.”
The allegation that Khan undermined the cryptographic security now forms a major part of state security charges against the former prime minister, who remains Pakistan’s most popular politician. A conviction on the charges would likely prevent Khan from being able to contest future elections, including those expected early next year.
Smoke from a fire billows during a protest by angry supporters of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan as police fire tear gas to disperse them after the arrest of Khan, in Peshawar, Pakistan, on May 9, 2023.
Photo: Muhammad Sajjad/AP
“Regime Change” Cypher
The scandal over the cypher and Khan’s claim that it described a “regime change” conspiracy has gripped Pakistan since his removal from power in 2022. In public statements, Khan had claimed that attempts had been made by foreign powers “to influence our foreign policy from abroad.” After his removal the U.S. subsequently assisted Pakistan in obtaining a generous IMF loan, while Pakistan began producing ammunition for the war in Ukraine. Khan had sought to keep Pakistan neutral in the conflict, a stance the State Department had angrily objected to in the meeting described in the cypher.
Following Khan’s removal, Pakistan has been gripped by a series of political, economic, and security crises. The country has experienced record-breaking inflation, social unrest, and a wave of terrorist attacks by the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan’s current army chief, Gen. Asim Munir, visited the U.S. last week to build ties with U.S. policymakers, even as the country continues to be nominally led by a civilian caretaker government.
Khan was arrested on August 5, 2023, after being sentenced to three years in prison over a politically dubious corruption case. That conviction was suspended by the High Court later that month, yet he has remained behind bars ever since thanks to subsequent charges made against him over his handling of the cypher.
Khan’s lawyers have criticized his jailing as illegal and unconstitutional. Legal proceedings against him have been mired in secrecy, legal irregularities, and accusations of abuse, including violations of his privacy while imprisoned. Khan’s trial has been under strict controls that have impeded media coverage. During his imprisonment, supporters of his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, continue to hold large rallies in the country despite attempts at government suppression.
After a long delay, Pakistan is expected to hold elections early next year, though Khan, who polls show would likely win a free vote, is unlikely to participate thanks to his compounding legal challenges. Prominent among these is the charge that Khan’s alleged mishandling of the cypher document risked compromising Pakistan’s encryption systems — notwithstanding the ISI’s own internal conclusion that no such risk existed.
While his state secrets trial continues, there is no public indication that the ISI has turned this exculpatory evidence over to Khan’s defense team.
The post Secret Pakistan Document Undermines Espionage Case Against Imran Khan appeared first on The Intercept.
Advocates Demand Compensation for U.S. Drone Strike Victims in Somalia
Two Dozen human rights organizations called on the Pentagon Monday to make amends to a Somali family following an investigation by The Intercept of a 2018 U.S. drone strike that killed a woman and her 4-year-old daughter.
The 14 Somali groups and 10 international organizations devoted to the protection of civilians urged Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to take immediate action. The family is seeking an explanation, an apology, and compensation.
“New reporting illustrates how in multiple cases of civilian harm in Somalia confirmed by the U.S. government, civilian victims, survivors, and their families have yet to receive answers, acknowledgement, and amends despite their sustained efforts to reach authorities over several years,” reads the open letter, which was shared with The Intercept.
The April 1, 2018, attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. A U.S. military investigation acknowledged the deaths of a woman and child but concluded their identities might never be known. This reporter traveled to Somalia and spoke with seven of their relatives. “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable,” said Abdi Dahir Mohammed, one of Luul’s brothers. “We’ve been hurt — and humiliated.”
The Pentagon’s inquiry found that the Americans who conducted the strike were confused and inexperienced and that they argued about basic details, like how many passengers were in the targeted vehicle, according to a report obtained by The Intercept under the Freedom of Information Act after multiple requests, appeals, and a lawsuit. The U.S. task force members mistook a woman and a child for an adult male and killed Luul and Mariam in a follow-up strike as they ran from the truck in which they had hitched a ride to visit relatives. Despite this, the investigation — by the unit that conducted the attack — concluded that standard operating procedures and the rules of engagement were followed. No one was ever held accountable for the deaths.
The human rights advocates’ letter asks Austin to “take immediate steps to address the requests of families whose loved ones were killed or injured by U.S. airstrikes in Somalia” after the U.S. military ignored repeated attempts by another of Luul’s brothers, 38-year-old Abubakar Dahir Mohamed, to contact U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM.
“For more than five years, we have tried to make sure the identities of Luul and Mariam are known to the U.S.,” Abubakar wrote in a recent op-ed for The Continent. “I now know that the U.S. military has admitted not only to killing Luul and Mariam, but doing so even after they survived the first strike. It killed them as Luul fled the car. … The U.S. has said this in its reports, and individual officers have spoken to journalists. But it has never said this to us. No one has contacted us at all.”
Congress appropriates millions of dollars annually for the Defense Department to compensate families of civilians killed or injured in U.S. attacks, but the Pentagon has shown an aversion to confronting its mistakes and rarely makes compensation payments, even in cases as clear cut as this one.
“The U.S. response thus far stands in stark contrast to this administration’s stated priorities of mitigating, responding to, and learning from civilian harm,” reads the letter. “We urge the Department of Defense to urgently make long-overdue amends in consultation with Abubakar’s family and their representatives, including condolence payments and an explanation for why their demands appear to have been ignored until now.”
When asked if Luul’s family deserves compensation and if an apology and amends would be offered, the Office of the Secretary of Defense replied, “We do not have anything to provide for you on this right now.” AFRICOM also failed to answer The Intercept’s questions about contacting Luul’s family and providing compensation.
Last year, in response to increasing public reporting on America’s killing of civilians; underreporting of noncombatant casualties; failures of accountability; and outright impunity in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, the Pentagon pledged reforms. The 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, known in Washington as the CHMR-AP, provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses noncombatant deaths, but lacks mechanisms for addressing past civilian harm.
“Although the CHMR-AP does not specifically provide for a re-examination of past incidents, nothing in the CHMR-AP prevents review of incidents in light of new information and appropriate reconsideration of past assessments and decisions under the improved processes and practices that the CHMR-AP seeks to establish,” Pentagon spokesperson Lisa Lawrence wrote in an email response to The Intercept’s questions.
“Making good on the Defense Department’s commitments to improve how the U.S. prevents and responds to civilian harm must include reckoning with the harms of the last 20-plus years of U.S. operations,” said Annie Shiel, U.S. advocacy director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, one of the signatories of the letter. “The U.S. has at its disposal at least $3 million annually to make condolence payments to civilian victims and survivors — payments that we know provide both tangible assistance and symbolic meaning for families grieving and rebuilding from unimaginable loss. In this case and in others in Somalia and around the world, the U.S. owes it to survivors to make amends in whatever way is most meaningful for them — be that a formal apology, answers about what happened to their loved ones and why, condolence payments, or other assistance.”
The letter was also signed by Airwars, Amnesty International USA, the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (USA), Caddalaad Doon, Coalition of Somali Human Rights Defenders, Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, Hiraan Women Development and Family Care, Human Rights Watch, Juba Aid for Peace and Development Organization, Jubaland Youth Leaders, Kalkal Human Rights Development Organization, Marginalized Community Advocacy Network, PAX, People’s Aspiration and Human Rights Organization, Reprieve US, Resilience Hope Foundation, Somali Awareness and Social Development Organization, Somali Legal Action Network, Victim Advocates International, Waamo, Women and Child Support Organization, Youth Initiative and Human Rights Advocacy, and Zomia Center. In addition to the 2018 strike investigated by The Intercept, the letter mentions several other cases in which U.S. attacks in Somalia harmed civilians, including a 2020 drone strike that killed a teenage girl as she was sitting down to dinner with her family. Her relatives have also been trying for years to contact the U.S. in search of an explanation but have received no response, the letter says.
Advocates say that the deaths of Luul and Mariam provide the Pentagon with a unique opportunity to make good on long-standing promises to improve its mitigation of civilian harm and learn from past mistakes. A drone pilot and analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the attack was no anomaly. “When I went to Africa, it seemed like no one was paying attention. It was like, ‘We can do whatever we want,’” he told The Intercept. When he counted the civilians he knew the U.S. had killed and compared that tally with publicly announced figures, he said, “the numbers just didn’t add up.”
“Our clients in this case began attempting to contact AFRICOM and the DoD in the immediate days after Luul and Mariam were killed and have followed every procedure these institutions have made available,” said Clare Brown, the deputy director of Victim Advocates International, an organization that supports victims of serious international crimes, including war crimes, and is now representing Luul’s family. “We are in the process of compiling a case which we intend to transmit to the U.S. through every possible portal, in the hope of finally getting a response. The family has the same ask they have been making for the past five and a half years — for both compensation and to be told, face to face, what happened to their sister and her daughter on that day in April 2018.”
Luul’s family was traumatized by the airstrike and has suffered for more than half a decade. Her brothers say their elderly father — who died earlier this month — never recovered from his daughter’s sudden death. Luul’s 6-year-old son, Mohamed Shilow Muse, constantly asks why Luul left him and is terrified of being alone. If he sees or hears a drone, he hides beneath a tree.
“Since the strike, our family has been broken apart. It has been more than five years since it happened, but we have not been able to move on,” Abubakar wrote. “But in all that time, even as we have contacted [the U.S. government] in every way we know how, we have never been able to even start a process of getting justice. The U.S. has never even acknowledged our existence.”
The post Advocates Demand Compensation for U.S. Drone Strike Victims in Somalia appeared first on The Intercept.
Pentagon Taps “Tiger Team” to Rush Weapons to Israel
The Pentagon is working to expedite weapons exports to Israel by deploying a so-called Tiger Team of experts to facilitate the transfers, according to procurement records reviewed by The Intercept. Some of the arms sales will be carried out through a new Army initiative designed specifically for the provision of weapons to Israel.
The Israel-specific program, called the Israel Significant Initiatives Group, is located within the Army’s Defense Exports and Cooperation office, which oversees policy for U.S. arms sales.
The Tiger Team meets daily with the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, or DSCA, which executes U.S. arms sales, to overcome barriers to arms sales to Israel. The “tiger team,” a crisis rapid response team involving a diverse set of experts, is supposed to examine potential bottlenecks and delays in weapons transfers and offer advice for alleviating the issues.
The existence of both the Tiger Team and the Israel Significant Initiatives Group have not been previously reported.
“As implementer of the vast majority of both State and Defense Department security assistance, DSCA sits at the center of our arms transfers to Israel,” said Josh Paul, a former director for the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which oversees U.S. arms transfers. He said the creation of a Tiger Team is a policy choice by President Joe Biden to get weapons to Israel as fast as possible.
“This shows that at all levels of government, from policy to implementation, the Biden Administration is doing all it can to rush arms to Israel despite President Biden’s recent explicit statement that Israel’s bombing of Gaza is ‘indiscriminate,’ and despite extensive reporting that the arms we are providing are causing massive civilian casualties,” said Paul, who resigned from the State Department in protest of the Biden administration’s ongoing weapons assistance to Israel. “This will not be a proud moment for the Biden Administration, the State Department – or for DSCA.”
The Defense Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the Tiger Team and the Israel Significant Initiatives Group.
According to a source familiar with the Tiger Team, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations, the group of experts has raised harm to civilians in Gaza as a potential issue with U.S. weapons sales to Israel.
“The Tiger Team is looking at issues of civilian harm, and is raising those issues, but is being met with absolute lack of interest and direction from the top to keep the process moving,” the source said.
“The Tiger Team is looking at issues of civilian harm, and is raising those issues, but is being met with absolute lack of interest.”
Both the Tiger Team and the Israel Significant Initiatives Group are using defense contractors to staff up. Reference to the Tiger Team appears in a job posting by the Hoplite Group.
“In response to the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency has served as the implementer of the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) process with Israel,” the job listing says. “There is a desire to generate real-time Lessons Learned to assess major bottlenecks, anticipate major hurdles to overcome, and analyze the limits of FMS support to Partner Nations.”
Another defense contractor, Sigmatech, listed a position for an “operations support specialist” to work on the Israel Significant Initiatives Group. The listing has since been removed.
The White House convened a Tiger Team in preparation for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to the Washington Post. After the invasion, the Tiger Team reportedly developed contingency plans for how to respond in the event that Russian President Vladimir Putin resorted to chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.
Israel’s War on Gaza
According to Paul, the new Tiger Team for Israel shows that the arms sales system, already supercharged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is still not fast enough for the administration.
“The assembling of a Tiger Team demonstrates that the Biden administration believes that all of the existing mechanisms of arms transfer — mechanisms which have proved their extreme ability to expedite arms transfers to Ukraine for the past two years — do not work fast enough,” Paul said.
The Defense Exports and Cooperation office has previously touted its work providing security assistance to allied countries. Over the past year, for example, it has posted copies of several Defense Department press releases detailing security assistance to Ukraine, as well as other partner countries like Colombia and the Philippines.
“U.S. Sends Ukraine $400 Million in Military Equipment,” a March press release is titled. The release includes a picture of a tank unit billowing smoke from its howitzers. Another press release, from December of last year, detailed a security package to Ukraine, right down to the specific numbers of munitions like artillery, tank, and mortar rounds.
When it comes to Israel, the Defense Exports and Cooperation office has not posted a single press release this year. Secrecy has been a hallmark of the Biden administration’s weapons transfers to Israel, as The Intercept has previously reported.
White House spokesperson John Kirby acknowledged the secrecy in October. “We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course,” he told reporters.
Shortly after the October 7 Hamas attack against Israel, the White House asked Congress to remove key restrictions on Israel’s ability to access U.S. weapons stockpiles in the country, as The Intercept reported last month. The White House request sought to “allow for the transfer of all categories of defense articles” from the stockpiles, as well as to remove requirements that such weapons be obsolete or surplus in nature.
In other instances of weapons sales to Israel, the administration has cut out Congress entirely. Last week, the Biden administration bypassed Congress to authorize the sale of 13,000 tank shells to Israel.
The post Pentagon Taps “Tiger Team” to Rush Weapons to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.
State Department Stuns Congress, Saying Biden Is Not Even Reviewing Trump’s Terror Designation of Cuba
As one of his final foreign policy acts as president, in January 2021 Donald Trump added Cuba to the list of “State Sponsors of Terror,” reversing the Obama administration’s 2015 determination that the designation was no longer appropriate.
The incoming Biden administration pledged to Congress it would start the process of overturning Trump’s redesignation, which by statute requires a six-month review process. Yet in a private briefing last week on Capitol Hill, State Department official Eric Jacobstein stunned members of Congress by telling them that the department has not even begun the review process, according to three sources in the room.
In the briefing, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., inquired as to the status of the review. In order to remove Cuba from the list, statute requires at least a six-month review period. The news that the State Department had not even launched the review came as a surprise to McGovern and others in the room, and meant that the delisting couldn’t occur before mid-2024 at the earliest. McGovern pressed Jacobstein, noting that Congress had previously been assured that a review was underway. Jacobstein, according to sources in the room, said that perhaps there had been some misunderstanding around a different review of sanctions policies that State was undertaking.
“I don’t think they were prepared to respond to how upset members were,” said one Democrat, who was granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting. “They were furious.”
Vedant Patel, a spokesperson for the State Department, declined to comment on a closed-door meeting in Congress, and additionally declined to directly confirm or deny whether a review was ongoing. “We’re not going to comment on the deliberative process as it relates to the status of any designation,” said Patel. “Any review of Cuba’s status on the SST list — should one ever happen — would be based on the law and criteria established by Congress.”
McGovern, however, had already been told that such a review was ongoing, according to multiple sources who heard directly from McGovern about the State Department’s messaging.
Biden’s refusal to even review Cuba’s status marks a strong rebuke of one of the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievements, the move toward normalizing relations with Cuba.
The Trump administration’s rationale for redesignating Cuba as a sponsor of terror relied heavily on the country having hosted representatives from FARC and ELN, two armed guerrilla movements designated by the U.S. as terror groups. But in October 2022, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a joint press conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, noted that Colombia itself, in cooperation with the Obama administration, had asked Cuba to host the FARC and ELN members as part of peace talks. The move by the Trump administration was “an injustice,” he said, and ought to be undone. “It is not us [Colombia] who must correct it, but it does need to be corrected,” added Petro, himself a onetime guerrilla.
“When it comes to Cuba,” Blinken said at the press conference, “and when it comes to the state sponsor of terrorism designation, we have clear laws, clear criteria, clear requirements, and we will continue as necessary to revisit those to see if Cuba continues to merit that designation.” Blinken’s public claim — “we will continue as necessary to revisit” the designation — coupled with private assurances from the State Department left members of Congress certain that a review was underway.
Blinken was also asked about Cuba’s status in a hearing in March 2023 and said that Cuba had yet to meet the requirements to be removed from the list. “In both of these instances the Secretary was reiterating what we’ve said previously — should there be rescission of the SST status, it would need to be consistent with specific statutory criteria for rescinding a SST determination,” Patel said.
The terror designation makes it difficult for Cubans to do international business, crushing an already fragile economy. The U.S. hard-line approach to Cuba has coincided with a surge in desperate migration, with Cubans now making up a substantial portion of the migrants arriving at the southern border. Nearly 425,000 Cubans have fled for the United States in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, shattering previous records. Instead of moving to stem the flow by focusing on root causes in Cuba, the Biden White House has been signaling support in recent days for Republican-backed border policies.
Hopes for a shift on Cuba policy have not just been fueled by the State Department’s misleading pledges about a review, but also by a semi-public moment picked up by a hot mic ahead of the previous State of the Union, in which Biden approached New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, one of the chamber’s leading Cuba hawks, and told him the two needed to chat. “Bob, I gotta talk to you about Cuba,” Biden told him. Menendez has since been indicted as an alleged intelligence asset of Egypt, and there is no indication the two have talked about Cuba.
The post State Department Stuns Congress, Saying Biden Is Not Even Reviewing Trump’s Terror Designation of Cuba appeared first on The Intercept.