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Veterans Group Calls for Grand Jury Probe of Blinken for Enabling Israel's Genocide
"Members of the Biden administration unwilling to rein in Israel and furthering its genocide in Gaza need to go to jail," said the human rights attorney representing Veterans for Peace.
Sep 30, 2024
An organization representing anti-war U.S. veterans urged the Justice Department on Monday to immediately impanel a grand jury to investigate—and, if necessary, indict—Secretary of State Antony Blinken for lying to Congress, unlawfully refusing to cut off American military aid to Israel, and "conspiring to cause genocide of Palestinians."
The call from Veterans for Peace (VFP) comes days after the investigative outlet ProPublicapublished a detailed account of how the U.S. State Department submitted a report to Congress that contradicted the findings of the department's own experts and those of other agencies.
The Blinken-led State Department's May report concluded that Israel was not "prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance," despite internal assessments from State Department experts and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) arguing that Israel had deliberately impeded American aid shipments to Gaza and that weapons transfers to the country should be cut off in line with Section 620I of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act.
In a letter addressed to the Justice Department's Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section and U.S. District Attorney Matthew Graves, VFP specifically cites ProPublica's reporting and states that "Blinken's failure to implement U.S. federal law and halt weapons shipments to Israel touches upon both domestic and international law."
"Secretary Blinken's lack of candor with the Congress to continue the provision of military aid to Israel meant concealing the existence of the USAID and State Department reports showing repeat violations of aid requirements," the new letter reads. "The concealed reports explicitly recommended the immediate cutoff of military aid to Israel. By allegedly lying to Congress, Secretary Blinken caused ongoing genocidal acts and war crimes against the Palestinians by continuing the supply of weapons and munitions to Israel."
"The Israeli military continues detonating massive bombs in southern Beirut—bombs they would not possess but for Antony Blinken's repeated violations of federal laws."
The letter also points to the role of U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew in ensuring the continued flow of American arms to Israel even as human rights organizations accumulated overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces were using the weapons to commit horrific war crimes in Gaza. According to ProPublica, Lew "sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel's war cabinet... should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians" and "recommended continuing to provide military assistance."
"The alleged wrongdoing of Secretary of State Blinken of lying to Congress, supported by what looks like willful provision of inaccurate information from Ambassador Lew, combined to save Israel from interruption of U.S. provision of weapons and munitions," VFP argued in its letter. "Thus Israel was able to continue to perpetrate war crimes and genocidal acts."
The group wrote that Blinken and Lew "appear to have violated the objectives of U.S. foreign policy against fomenting war, against allowing war crimes, and against the commission of human rights violations," which "enabled Israel to breach the Genocide Convention and the orders of the International Court of Justice."
Terry Lodge, VFP's human rights counsel, said in a statement Monday that "the Israeli military continues detonating massive bombs in southern Beirut—bombs they would not possess but for Antony Blinken's repeated violations of federal laws aimed at halting human rights and war crimes violations."
"Members of the Biden administration unwilling to rein in Israel and furthering its genocide in Gaza need to go to jail," Lodge added.
VFP's letter came days after the U.S. and Israel reached a deal for an additional $8.7 billion in American military support, even as the Israeli military continues to obstruct aid deliveries in Gaza, bombard the enclave's starving population, and expand the assault on Lebanon.
In an appearance on MSNBC last week, USAID Administrator Samantha Power brushed off host Andrea Mitchell's question about ProPublica's reporting, downplaying her agency's assessment of Israel's aid obstructions as "a report from months ago."
ProPublica reported last week that USAID sent Blinken "a detailed 17-page memo" that "described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine."
Susan Schnall, VFP's president, said Monday that U.S. military aid to Israel amounts to "a theft from millions of Americans who have none of the health insurance every Israeli enjoys; from millions of Americans living in horrific housing while Israel builds thousands of upscale homes on land stolen from Palestinians; from millions of young Americans can't afford college because America's top priorities are weapons and death, not human needs."
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'Rank Dishonesty': Internal Docs Detail How Blinken Rejected Calls to Cut Off US Arms to Israel
"The Biden administration is not only complicit in genocide. It's knowingly complicit," said one analyst.
Sep 24, 2024
When the U.S. State Department, headed by Antony Blinken, told Congress earlier this year that "we do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance," it was directly contradicting the internal findings of its own experts and those of USAID.
Blinken's decision to publicly reject conclusions by other U.S. officials despite the compelling evidence they marshaled highlighted "a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel," ProPublicareported Tuesday in a detailed story examining internal communications and other private documents.
Under U.S. law—specifically Section 620I of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act—the federal government is barred from approving arms transfers to any country that "prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance."
Blinken's official denial that Israel is restricting the flow of U.S. humanitarian aid allows the Biden administration to maintain that its weapons transfers are lawful.
ProPublica obtained emails showing that, prior to Blinken's statement to Congress denying that Israel was impeding the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid, the head of the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration had "determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel."
USAID, headed by the prominent liberal interventionist Samantha Power—who authored a book on American leaders' failure to act in the face of genocide—separately concluded in both a report and a 17-page memo to Blinken that Israel deliberately restricted U.S. humanitarian aid shipments to Gaza, which is now facing famine, the reemergence of polio, and other crises.
"The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine," ProPublica reported Tuesday. "The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel's behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country."
USAID sent its memo to Blinken less than a month before the U.S. State Department told Congress that, contrary to the findings of administration experts as well as scores of outside groups, the Israeli military was not restricting U.S. humanitarian aid.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote that the new ProPublica reporting underscores that "the Biden administration is not only complicit in genocide. It's knowingly complicit."
Filmmaker Alex Gibney accused Blinken of "rank dishonesty on Gaza."
"Providing more offensive weapons to continue this disastrous war would be immoral. It would also be illegal."
ProPublica's reporting also details the role Jack Lew, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, played in ensuring that U.S. weapons continued to flow to the Israeli military. In March, the investigative outlet noted, Lew "sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians."
While Lew conceded that "other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement" of humanitarian assistance, he argued that on the whole "Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede" aid provided or backed by the U.S.
That statement, according to United Nations figures and assessments by aid organizations on the ground, has proven to be false.
Last week, a coalition of humanitarian groups estimated that Israel's siege is blocking 83% of food aid from reaching the Gaza Strip, where most of the population is hungry and at growing risk of starvation.
An update released Monday by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) notes that 46% of "humanitarian movements have been either denied or impeded in August, making it the most challenging month for humanitarian access since January 2024."
Meanwhile, U.S. arms are still flowing to the Israeli military as it continues to assail Gaza and expand its attacks on Lebanon.
Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department announced the approval of $165 million in weapons sales to Israel, a decision that came less than 30 days after the Biden administration signed off on a sprawling $20 billion sale of U.S. arms.
The latter transfer is the target of a resolution of disapproval announced last week by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who said in a floor speech that Israel's restrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza amount to a "clear violation of U.S. and international law."
"Providing more offensive weapons to continue this disastrous war would be immoral. It would also be illegal," Sanders said. "The sales would reward Netanyahu's extremist government even as it flouts U.S. policy goals at every turn and drags the United States closer to a regional war."
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IG Report Confirms Critics of Misguided US Aid Pier in Gaza Were Exactly Right
Like outside humanitarian workers and other critics, USAID staffers warned the pier would detract from efforts to step up aid deliveries via border crossings.
Aug 28, 2024
Palestinian civilians, humanitarian aid workers on the ground in Gaza, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, and other rights advocates all said the same thing earlier this year as U.S. President Joe Biden announced plans to construct a $230 million temporary pier to deliver relief to Gaza residents being starved by Israel's aid blockade: The pier was no substitute for reopening border crossings and would undercut efforts to pressure Israel to do so.
Their warnings went unheeded, but a report released by the Office of the Inspector General at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on Tuesday showed that outside critics were echoing concerns that were also being brought up within the agency.
"Multiple USAID staff expressed concerns that the focus on using JLOTS [the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system] would detract from the agency's advocacy to open land crossings in Israel and Egypt, which were seen as more efficient and proven avenues for delivering aid to Gaza," wrote Inspector General Paul K. Martin in the report.
The critics both inside and outside of USAID were concerned that the temporary Trident Pier, which included an offshore barge and a causeway leading to the Gaza shore, would fail to provide the level of aid needed to save Palestinians from starvation and the diseases that they were becoming more vulnerable to due to months of acute food insecurity.
At the time that Biden announced the pier's planned construction in his State of the Union address in March, the United Nations had just reported that at least 20 children had died from starvation, including a 14-day-old baby. Jamie McGoldrick, U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, issued an urgent call for at least 300 aid trucks to cross through the Karem Abu Salem and Rafah bording crossings, and said, "Right now, we're lucky if we are getting about 150."
With USAID allowing Israel to inspect all aid deliveries that arrived at the Trident Pier, which was eventually built in May, critics at the time warned that the temporary port would do nothing to ensure relief got to starving Palestinians faster.
Itay Epshtain, a special adviser to the Norwegian Refugee Council based in Israel, said the inspector general's report on Tuesday represented "one more 'I told you so'" for those who had denounced the pier as a "PR move" last spring.
When the Trident Pier was announced, Epshtain said that "creativity is no substitute to upholding international law" by pressuring Israel to reopen all border crossings and to stop denying entry to humanitarian aid trucks.
The failure of the project became evident well before Martin released his report on Tuesday, with the pier shutting down on July 17 after operating for just 20 days.
Biden had set a goal of feeding 1.5 million people in Gaza for 90 days, but the operation brought in enough aid deliveries to feed just 450,000 people.
Martin noted in the report's conclusion that "about 96% of the population in Gaza, or 2.15 million people, continues to face severe
food insecurity and is at a high risk of famine."
The report also details the challenges faced by USAID, the Department of Defense, the World Food Program (WFP), and other partners after the pier was built.
The pier "was frequently rendered inoperable due to structural challenges caused by high winds and rough seas," and the WFP raised concerns at the outset that "lack of community buy-in among Palestinians for the maritime corridor could result in significant safety and security risks and compromise its operations."
The U.N. agency had warned USAID that it required "the clear and visible distinction between humanitarian and military actors" in order to participate in the project, but WFP officials were forced to pause their participation in June after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted a raid on the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing hundreds of Palestinians.
"Social media posts showed video of the IDF with the JLOTS pier in the background, resulting in the inference that Israel had used the pier inconnection with the military operation. In a statement on June 8, U.S. Central Command officially denied that the IDF used the pier in a military operation. The next day, WFP publicly announced a pause in operations at the temporary pier to conduct a security review."
Such security issues, "coupled with high winds and rough seas in the Mediterranean Sea near the Gaza coast, impaired the agency's ability to deliver the intended amounts of aid through the maritime corridor," reads the inspector general's report. "As USAID continues to respond to humanitarian needs in Gaza, it should examine its experience with JLOTS."
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