The U.S. secretary of state ignored evidence of siege warfare against civilians in Gaza because he knew he would face no consequences, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a warehouse with humanitarian aid bound for Gaza, at the Jordanian Hashemite Charity Organization in Amman, Jordan, on April 30. (State Department/Chuck Kennedy)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au
Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.
As Israel butchers hundreds of civilians in its latest attacks on Lebanon, leaked documents have surfaced revealing that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken knowingly lied to Congress about Israel’s siege warfare against civilians in Gaza.
ProPublica’s Brett Murphy, who has been covering aspects of this story for months, has a new article out titled “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.”
In it we learn that both USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration produced separate reports this past spring concluding that Israel was deliberately blocking much-needed humanitarian aid from Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which under U.S. law should have led to the suspension of U.S. weapons supplies.
Protesters form “the people’s red line” around the White House to demand end of Gaza genocide on June 12. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Blinken dismissed these findings, as did the rest of the headless cohort known as the Biden administration.
Days after receiving these reports, Blinken delivered a statement to Congress that he knew to be false, saying,
“We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”
This was a lie. Blinken’s own people were telling him Israel was obstructing aid, but he lied to Congress about it in order to ensure that Israel would keep receiving the weapons it needs to keep killing Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
Blinken needs to resign. There need to be calls from Dem senators demanding it. https://t.co/61X6KyIZ14 pic.twitter.com/dhsSlsyNAg
— austerity is theft ?? (@wideofthepost) September 24, 2024
This is what happens when you don’t prosecute your war criminals. Blinken lied to Congress that Israel wasn’t assessed to have been blocking aid when both USAID and the State Department’s refugees bureau had indeed assessed that the Israeli government is doing precisely that, because he knew he’d never be jailed for lying in facilitation of horrific war crimes.
USAID Administrator Samantha Power on Feb. 25 touring a World Food Program warehouse in Amman, Jordan, used to consolidate and prepare humanitarian assistance supplies for onward shipment to Gaza. (USAID, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
Blinken has watched George W. Bush’s entire cabinet not only walk free but continue to have high-profile careers in government, punditry, think tanks and the military-industrial complex, when they all should have been caged for two decades now.
He watched C.I.A. officials like Michael Hayden lie to Congress about the agency’s torture program without ever facing any consequences.
[See: The Madness of Antony Blinken.]
He watched Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lie to Congress about the NSA’s surveillance program without ever facing any consequences. He knew he could lie to Congress about some of the worst atrocities his nation has ever participated in because he knew there would never be any consequences for this.
Clapper speaking at an event on national security on Sept. 22, 2016. (LBJ Library, Flickr, Jay Godwin)
None of the world’s worst people are in prison, but if you ever did anything to try to bring them to justice yourself you’d spend the rest of your life behind bars, or be executed. The law doesn’t exist to protect ordinary people from the worst of our society, it exists to protect the worst of our society from ordinary people.
Unchecked massacres in Lebanon. A continuing genocide in Palestine. The state just murdered an innocent man.
Y’all know that a democratic administration is in power right now? Just wanted to point that out… pic.twitter.com/Dan5iMXLyl
— Greg J Stoker (@gregjstoker) September 24, 2024
It’s worth noting here that while powerful people in Washington break the law and lie in facilitation of mass atrocities, the U.S. is executing Black men without evidence of their guilt.
The state of Missouri just executed a man named Marcellus Williams despite objections from prosecutors, jurors, and the victim’s own family due to a lack of solid evidence that he actually committed the murder for which he was convicted.
Days earlier, Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah was executed in North Carolina despite the key witness in his case recanting his testimony against him.
Both men were Black, and both men were Muslim. As men with white skin lie with impunity to help butcher brown-skinned civilians in the Middle East, I personally find this noteworthy.
This has been going on a long time. In 1902, the renowned attorney Clarence Darrow said the following in a speech to inmates at the Cook County Jail in Chicago:
“Those men who own the earth make the laws to protect what they have. They fix up a sort of fence or pen around what they have, and they fix the law so the fellow on the outside cannot get in. The laws are really organized for the protection of the men who rule the world. They were never organized or enforced to do justice. We have no system for doing justice, not the slightest in the world.”
It’s just as true in 2024 as it was in 1902.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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If you haven’t read “The Racket” by Matt Kennard, you are missing out on how entrenched we really are. Thanks again for the great article Caitlin!
Will all these hate mongers, war mongers and whatever else ‘mongers’ ever get their due, overdue, PUNISHMENT???
That is questionable. Covid unhinged them. They now regard any action that moves toward their goals as acceptable. The rest of us are worthless eaters.
Vera! Answer is very simple, not until Americans get of the asses and decide to do it.
It is pretty amazing to me that so many in the U.S. callfor or idly sit by and observe the killing of innocents and say nothing.
As the former President Obama said many times before and after he signed of on extra judicial executions, “Is this the country we really strive to create?”
Apparently the answer from the elites is yes. Friggin’ mind boggling!
What a coincidence! This article happens to touch upon issues of honesty, corruption, and overt illegality within our current administration which I just encountered personally in a message from medicare.gov with the apparently innocuous title “A message from President Biden on Medicare Open Enrollment” which turned out to be blatantly political propaganda on behalf of the Democratic party’s current president and their nominee to replace him sent out professing to be useful health care information allegedly written personally by our president over the unambiguous statement “This message is paid for by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.” Whether government agencies using our tax dollars are legally prohibited from performing such services for a specific political party I do not know, but it certainly smells like something that ought to be.
The first blue-sky assertion is his statement that “I want to make sure you’re aware of historic changes to Medicare that are … ensuring that every American has the peace of mind that comes with quality, affordable health care” while all the promises for future improvements Democrats made after the ‘Affordable Care Act’ fell disastrously short of anything remotely resembling real health-care reform have failed to materialize at all during the ensuing 14 years.
The most blatant lie it contains is Biden’s statement “Vice President Harris and I believe that health care should be a right, not a privilege” which the modest changes to Medicare that he claims he and Harris deserve credit for come nowhere near that level of protection and his own statement that if a Medicare for All bill landed on his desk he would veto it suggests that perhaps his fading mental acuity allowed this lie to emerge (not to mention the difficulty of pinning Harris down to any controversial position that might inconvenience party donors).
So this garbage is pure campaign rhetoric distributed by a U.S. government agency which attempts to convince voters (using non-quantitative assertions that, for example, completely ignore the effects that keeping changes acceptable to party special interest donors may radically increase the rate at which the medicare trust fund is depleted thus just shifting problems into the not-that-far future) that our still grossly inadequate health-care system fails to attain standards that are surpassed by common noticeably less costly systems elsewhere in the world.
Many of you may have received this message yourselves so I’ll leave it up to you to present it with your own reactions in response to this brief comment.
It looks like to me they are scrambling to get votes. I wonder which “think tank” came up with this idea. And are Harris/Biden even aware of it?
Well, they should be. The email title is “A message from President Biden”, the content begins with the words “Presidential Seal” (perhaps a graphic that got suppressed by my email client), the salutation is “Dear William” and the following text says “I want to make sure you’re aware of historic changes to Medicare” and continues with “These historic reforms are a result of the Inflation Reduction Act that I signed into law and that Vice President Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to secure” and then “and we’re just getting started” and “These are just some of the ways my Administration has worked to help you save money on your health care costs” (again quite personal rather than sounding like the words of some third party) plus the two other quotes I noted above and then with the closing words “President Joe Biden signature” (perhaps another suppressed graphic) and the words “Joe Biden”.
Perhaps I should have included the entire email after all.
Is it true that Blinken holds dual
US-Israeli citizenship ?
It is a little-known fact that Blinken’s
Wife, Evan Ryan, holds the position
Of Cabinet Secretary, who is basically
A liaison between the President and
The Cabinet. She has been active in
White House politics since the mid
1990’s and married to Blinken since
2002. All in the family, so to speak.
Irina Nope! All you have to do is google Anthony Blinker Dual citizenship, his is listed as an Jewish American. A hard ‘boiled’ true believer of the first order. Ask the snake!
But how do we know for sure. Many at Google claim he is, I don’t know,personally, but this issue makes little difference to him. However, in my opinion he holds a position in our government which, because of his professed beliefs places him in an severe ethical conflict of interest. There is a reason his wife serves under a different last name. Again my opinion.
In fact look and you find that Robert Kagan husband of one Victoria Nuland have worked at top Federal government levels and fly under the radar.of the worthless MSM, we know any way don’t we.
Kagan a neoconservative , studied at Yale and A critic of U.S. foreign policy and a student of an advocate of liberal interventionism! He co-founded the Project For The New American century with William Kristol.
Deceptive practices at the very top of our government. When Trump ran he resigned the republican party and backed the Queen of Chaos. Stating to get the picture? Kagan / Blinken two snakes swimming around in the swamp!
It is all a part of our western superiority complex where we deserve to have full spectrum dominance of the world because our fictitious god gave it to us to rule. That make the rules for everyone else that do not apply to us. We got away with a lot due to the cold war but really that was always the case for our religious monotheistic empires. In this age it is not as easy to preach our humanitarian hypocrisy. It could be even the choir knows we are just pretending that money and power rules us as our god..
My question is: did he lie to himself first, or to congress.?
(Because he obviously lied to himself at some point.)
I don’t think he needs to lie to himself. Blinken is a stone-cold killer, a committed Zionist.
I think our American pols used to complain about all the lies and injustices under the old Soviet system instituted by the Bolsheviks because they were jealous not because their sensibilities or morality were offended. To the contrary, they’ve tried like hell to emulate the worst of that tyrannical system–as well as several other infamous venues lovingly shaped by Herr Hitler, Comrade Mao and sundry other human detritus based in backwaters like Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia.
Can you imagine George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, both Clintons, Barack Obama, Joe Biden or Donald Trump running around free in a real democracy actually seeking truth, justice and some fiction called the “American way” after all the lies, international theft, ordered extra-judicial murders and millions of innocents slaughtered in extra-constitutional wars of their personal creation? And, topping it all off by claiming that it was all done in the name of “freedom” and “democracy?” “Liberty, Fraternity and Equality” must be some sarcastic punch line to all the never-ending lies, cruelties and injustices that dominate our real world, even the great American paradise which must be worshiped above all else… or else!