By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation
The State Department under Antony Blinken falsified a report to “absolve Israel of responsibility for blocking humanitarian aid flows into Gaza,” the Guardian reports.
Blinken had his underlings overrule the advice of the State Department’s own experts on the issue to ensure that US weapons kept flowing to Israel to aid in their ethnic cleansing campaign.
“I come before you, not only as the U.S. Secretary of State, but also as a Jew. My grandfather…fled pogroms… My stepfather…survived concentration camps. So…I understand…the harrowing echoes that Hamas’ massacres carry…for Jews everywhere.”
— Antony Blinken in Israel pic.twitter.com/GNyFbPx34c
— Frum TikTok (@FrumTikTok) October 12, 2023
From The Guardian, “US state department falsified report absolving Israel on Gaza aid – ex-official”:
The state department falsified a report earlier this month to absolve Israel of responsibility for blocking humanitarian aid flows into Gaza, overruling the advice of its own experts, according to a former senior US official who resigned this week.
Stacy Gilbert left her post as senior civil military adviser in the state department’s bureau of population, refugees and migration, on Tuesday. She had been one of the department’s subject matter experts who drafted the report mandated under national security memorandum 20 (NSM-20) and published on 10 May.
The NSM-20 report found that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had used US weapons in a way that was “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, but that there was not enough concrete evidence to link specific US-supplied weapons to violations.
Even more controversially, the report said the state department did not “currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance” in Gaza.
It was a high-stakes judgment because under a clause in the Foreign Assistance Act, the US would be obliged to cut arms sales and security assistance to any country found to have blocked delivery of US aid.
Gilbert, a 20-year veteran of the state department who has worked in several war zones, said that report’s conclusion went against the overwhelming view of state department experts who were consulted on the report.
[…] Gilbert was one of the experts consulted in drawing up the NSM-20 report, but she said it was taken out of their hands as it approached completion.“Sometime at the end of April, the subject matter experts were taken off the report and we were told it would be edited at a higher level. So I did not know what was in the report until it came out,” she said. “But when the report came out, late on the Friday afternoon [on 10 May], I read it and I had to reread it. I had to go back and print out that section and read it, because I could not believe it stated so starkly that we assess that Israel is not blocking humanitarian assistance.
“Two hours after it was released, I sent an email to my front office and the team that is working on this, saying I will resign as a result of this,” Gilbert said.
WATCH:
In April, ProPublica reported that Blinken was refusing to punish Israel for credible human rights abuses — including the sexual torture and “rape by an object” of a 15-year-old boy in Israeli Border Police custody — despite recommendations from staff at the State Department.
The State Department took steps to move forward on sanctions to one IDF unit accused of human rights abuses but then backed off under pressure from the Israeli government.
NEW: The U.S. backed off sanctioning an IDF battalion w documented human rights violations including actions that led to the death of an American citizen. The leader of the battalion’s U.S. nonprofit arm (yes) has given almost $100k to AIPAC’s super PAC https://t.co/cYMSw6FDGW
— Akela Lacy (@akela_lacy) May 23, 2024
As I reported earlier this week, White House national security spokesman John Kirby defended Israel airstriking displaced Palestinians in a tent city in Rafah by throwing the US military under the bus and stating that “we” Americans “did the same thing.”
It can’t get any more clear that for this administration, defending the interests of Israel comes before defending the interests of America.