GAZA RELIEF #63 October 31, 2024
More than 500 cases of alleged arms violations, but no State Department action
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Our most recent transfers of $3,000 each to Haitham, Hamad and Abu Saif were delayed nearly a week by a glitch at our bank. Haitham has now confirmed receipt of his allocation.
SPINELESS
The following article — about the organization of which I was a part for 26 years — makes me feel sick to my stomach. Not a single case, out of more than 500 cases, has led to any action whatsoever.
WashPost: U.S. inundated with claims that American arms killed Gaza civilians
The State Department has received hundreds of reports that Israel’s use of U.S. weapons is responsible for excessive civilian casualties in Gaza, officials say.
https://wapo.st/3Yy8FgC
ONE REASON FOR THAT SPINELESSNESS
POLITICO: Israel is the No. 1 lobbyist-funded travel destination for members of Congress
This fact should be old news after decades of lobbyist-funded Congressional travel to Israel. In my time there, 1991-95 and 2002-2007, fully a third of serving members of the entire U.S. Congress visited Israel in any given year, mostly on lobbyists’ dimes.
Many, like the late Senator Joe Lieberman, used both the lobbyist-funded trips and “official” trips to visit relatives in both Israel and in illegal West Bank settlements during the Jewish holidays, utilizing U.S. Embassy staff, resources and security personnel and armored vehicles.
They get the full treatment from the Israelis: briefings, cocktail receptions, luxurious hotels, banquets, photo ops with key officials for their next hometown mailers, and stupendously one-sided presentations that, to this day, recount the old “land without a people for a people without a land.”
The result is a chain of direct connections whereby Israeli officials down to the office director level (multiple levels below Cabinet rank) can literally pick up the phone and reach members of Congress person-to-person, bypassing the Administration with their requests and, more specifically, their complaints about, say, … allegations of arms violations.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/30/israel-aipac-funded-congress-travel-00185167
LEBANON
Media is heavily covering the war in Lebanon — a sovereign country — with plenty of photos and text, including reports that more than a quarter of all buildings in southern Lebanon have been damaged or destroyed, Tyre is being reduced to rubble, Baalbek ordered evacuated, and no sign of a ceasefire.
The Lebanon invasion has fulfilled Netanyahu’s aim of distracting both media attention and U.S. diplomatic efforts away from a Gaza ceasefire and steps toward a Palestinian state.
Israeli-American former IDF Major Amos Hochstein is back on the ground as Biden’s special envoy, again begging the question of, at the very least, the optics of the United States being represented by a former IDF officer. Really, who thought that would be a good idea?
AND NO LETUP IN GAZA
Air, artillery and ground assaults pulverize the northern and central parts of the Gaza Strip.
We are still asking for those figures on tonnages of U.S.-supplied munitions being blasted into fishbowl Gaza.
From Haitham: SCENES FROM ZAWAYDA AND BEIT LAHIYA, the latter place where 93 members of the Abu Nasr family were killed in IDF strikes
Haitham: The girl (Reem Abu haiia 8 months) was born during this war ... the only survivor of her family, 16 were killed and she was injured .
ANY SORT OF VISIBILITY MAKES YOU A TARGET
From Haaretz: Her Last Drawing Was Seen by 4.9M People. Last Week, This Gazan Animator Was Killed by Israel
As we have seen with journalists, bloggers, and just people sending out photographs of Gaza suffering, any tiny bit of visibility makes you a target for the IDF.
As we have also related, IDF targeting of such civilians represents a real threat to our Gaza friends who are communicating with us voice, various text apps and Zoom, all of which is picked up by the Israeli intelligence agencies for use in targeting.
THE U.S. MILITARY IS NOT THE BULWARK THAT YOU THINK IT IS
The media have focused a lot of attention recently on retired Generals Mark Milley, H.R. McMaster and John Kelly as defenders of democracy and constitutionality, but the ranks of officers and enlisted are not necessarily reflective of those characteristics. Example A is retired Army Lieutenant General (three stars out of a maximum possible four stars) Michael Flynn, who now leads a vast Christian nationalist, election-denying campaign that is criss-crossing the country to spread conspiracy theories and pave the way for an armed revolt to support Donald Trump.
Were Flynn a civilian, say a businessman, his racist, nationalist, autocratic actions, described in the following article, would be troubling. But as a commissioned general officer in the United States Army, they are far worse, and it is worth looking at where he comes from, what he has done in his career, and how his actions have helped destabilize the Middle East.
That’s because Flynn was not just any general officer, but has held some of the highest intelligence posts in the entire U.S. military, including the top intelligence officer at Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the secretive operational command for America’s Tier One Special Operations Forces: Delta, SealTeam 6, and the Army Rangers, plus the most sophisticated aviation units, Army Special Forces, Marine Raiders, and all the components to support them. In short, JSOC, where I have worked, and for whose personnel I have tremendous respect, commands the U.S. military’s manhunters, the most elite, sophisticated and deadly counter-terrorism forces.
As you may recall from an earlier post, one of my bosses, himself a former JSOC commander, told me how he and his operators had joined the IDF on operations in the West Bank prior to invading Afghanistan in order “to learn how to do it (counter-terrorism).” Hardly the people I would choose to teach our soldiers ethical conduct.
As head of JSOC intelligence, and later the Defense Intelligence Agency, plus more than 30 years of other intel billets, Flynn generated the intelligence findings for lethal strikes, established the parameters for allowable numbers of civilian deaths per target (depending on their value in the terrorist rankings), determined who was worth killing and what level of “collateral damage” (read innocent human beings) was acceptable.
His criteria and his subordinates determined whether an Iraqi wedding was supposedly a terrorist gathering, whether a taxi carrying humanitarian goods was really a terrorist vehicle, whether a farmer trying to eke out a living and carrying a weapon for self defense was a terrorist, whether a particular target was worth 20, 40, 60, 100 collateral (innocent) deaths.
So, now that we are seeing the real Michael Flynn — the racist, anti-Muslim, kill-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out general officer — the question is, how many Iraqi and Afghan innocents died because of the now clear and demonstrated prejudice of this anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, white Christian nationalist conspiracist who tried to overturn a presidential election, vocally supports the use of the U.S. military against American citizens, demonizes political opponents as evil and instruments of the devil, and calls for the elimination of the civil service, the suspension of civil rights, and the mass deportation of immigrants, both legal and otherwise.
How much harm has Michael Flynn done to the United States in his military career — the part before he started meeting secretly with the Russian Ambassador and then lied about it? How many anti-American jihadis did his years of attacks on innocent civilians spawn?
Sadly, he is not alone, as demonstrated by the fact that his superiors promoted him to some of the highest and most important levels of the U.S. armed forces, and by the fact that the State Department, too, follows a parallel path of unconcern for civilian casualties from American munitions.
With even a handful of personnel like Michael Flynn — and, yes, other former general and field grade officers such as retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg number among his compatriots in the white nationalist Christian Trump-supporting movement — it is worth considering what role individual elements of the U.S. military — both officers and enlisted personnel trained by the Michael Flynns of the military — might take upon themselves under the guise of “saving” the nation.
NYTimes: Far-Right Figures Escalate Talk of Retribution and Election Subversion
HEADLINES FROM ISRAEL
Liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz is always worth a quick morning review to capture the headlines documenting the Israeli Far RIght’s Trump-like ascension to, and now deployment of, political power: the civilization-destroying wars, of course, but there’s far more going on on the domestic front: continuing efforts to emasculate Israel’s Supreme Court; limit the power of anti-corruption prosecutors; keep Netanyahu out of jail; expel Palestinians; expand seizures of Palestinian property and construction of settlements. If you don’t want to subscribe, the headlines alone tell the story.
Recommended morning reading for everyone.