United States | News & Politics

https://archive.ph/giKoL

By Ralph Nader October 5, 2024

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21040916

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21039899

Jessica Washington
September 30 2024, 5:40 p.m.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21039743

Sam Biddle
October 2 2024, 3:30 p.m.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21022250

Ahmad Wuhidi October 4 2024, 6:00 a.m.

Last week, ProPublica detailed how the government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded in the spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza and that weapons sales should be halted.

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.

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.

As Israel pounded northern Gaza with air strikes last October and ordered the evacuation of more than a million Palestinians from the area, a senior Pentagon official delivered a blunt warning to the White House.

The mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel, Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, wrote in an Oct. 13 email to senior aides to President Joe Biden. Stroul was relaying an assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone,” she wrote.

The emails reviewed by Reuters show a scramble inside the Biden administration to warn the White House of the impending crisis – and the White House’s initial resistance to a ceasefire in the early, chaotic days of war. The three sets of email exchanges began on Oct. 11, during Israel’s fifth day of air strikes after the Hamas incursion.

After Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza’s hospitals, schools and mosques, the U.S. State Department’s top public diplomacy official, Bill Russo, told senior State officials that Washington was “losing credibility among Arab-speaking audiences” by not directly addressing the humanitarian crisis, according to an Oct. 11 email.

Gaza’s health authorities reported that day a death toll of about 1,200. As Israel defended the strikes, saying Hamas was using civilian buildings for military purposes, Russo wrote that U.S. diplomats in the Middle East were monitoring Arab media reports that accused Israel of waging a “genocide” and Washington of complicity in war crimes.

“The U.S.’s lack of response on the humanitarian conditions for Palestinians is not only ineffective and counterproductive, but we are also being accused of being complicit to potential war crimes by remaining silent on Israel’s actions against civilians,” Russo wrote

Biden’s public comments on Gaza had largely given Netanyahu a free hand against Hamas. At the time, Biden faced only scattered protests from the left wing of the Democratic Party over his support for Israel's counterattack. Israel's likening of the Hamas assault to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington resonated widely in the U.S.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20998907

October 01, 2024

Guest - Peter Goodman
NewYorkTimes global economics correspondent

[a surprisingly pro-worker viewpoint from a writer from the NYT -PL]

The Pentagon will spend about $1.2 billion to maintain ships deployed as part of operations in the Red Sea and to replenish stocks of missiles fired to repel attacks by Iran and its proxies, according to new budget documents.

About $190 million will be spent on the restock of the sea-launched RTX Corp. Standard Missile-3 Block 1B and about $8.5 million will go for more heat-seeking air-to-air AIM-X Sidewinder missiles, according to the documents.

Each advance model Standard Missile-3 Block IB costs between $9 million and $10 million. Two Navy destroyers this week fired about 12 Standard Missiles in defending Israel from another wave of Iranian assaults on Tuesday, according to a Navy official who declined to disclose the exact models and asked not to be identified discussing non-public information. That means this week’s US assistance likely cost about $120 million.

The documents also reveal requests for $276 million to buy additional Standard Missile, SM-6 model weapons as well as by $57.3 million for Tomahawks cruise missiles. Another $6.7 million is earmarked Enhanced Sea Sparrow self-defense missile. All those weapons are made by RTX.

The Pentagon will also spend $25 million for Boeing Co. Jdam-GPS guidance kits and $7.4 million for its Small Diameter Bomb. Another $25 million will go to “increase manufacturing sources” for the Standard Missile to support the Pentagon response to what it calls “the situation in Israel.”

American Hajj Kamel Ahmad Jawad, from Dearborn, Michigan, was killed by an airstrike in Lebanon on Tuesday, according to a statement released by his family.

Jawad was staying in Nabatieh, which is in the south of the country but north of the Litani River, according to his family.

The statement said he was killed in an Israeli airstrike. While Israel has been striking Nabatieh, ABC News cannot independently verify the manner of his death.

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who represents Dearborn, shared the statement on her Instagram. On X, she shared an article about Americans trying to evacuate Lebanon, saying one of her constituents there "was already killed in an Israeli airstrike."