SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
Some of us pause on Good Friday to mark the torture and death of a high-value detainee rendered, extraordinarily, to Roman occupiers.
Although the charges against Jesus of Nazareth were trumped up, the Romans decided to err on the safe side by going to the "dark side." They applied enhanced torture techniques with the ultimate hanging.
Some of us pause on Good Friday to mark the torture and death of a high-value detainee rendered, extraordinarily, to Roman occupiers.
Although the charges against Jesus of Nazareth were trumped up, the Romans decided to err on the safe side by going to the "dark side." They applied enhanced torture techniques with the ultimate hanging.
I try my best to follow the example set by that fellow from Nazareth. I do get beat up on occasion for "knowing where I stand and standing there," as Dan Berrigan has told us. But I don't expect to be tortured -- much less hung up to die. Those things just happen to folks who don't look like me.
In my worst nightmares I never dreamed that my country of birth, the country I love, would resort to torturing prisoners. Still less, did I expect my alma mater, Fordham University, to honor a person known to have championed kidnapping and torture (as well as illegal eavesdropping on Americans), by inviting him to give the commencement address.
What's the big deal? I have been asked. Aren't you proud to have a fellow Fordham alumnus at the right hand of the President as deputy national security adviser? When I answer, "Not proud, but shamed," I am met with a quizzical look.
When the shock wears off, I realize this should come as no surprise. The findings of a Pew poll conducted three years ago should have accustomed me to the shame. Those polled were white non-Hispanic Catholics, white Evangelicals, and white mainline Protestants. A majority of those who attend church regularly (54 percent) said torture could be "justified," while a majority of those not attending church regularly responded that torture was rarely or never justified.
I let myself wonder whether similar results might obtain, if a similar poll were conducted today at Fordham. And then I remembered that most of the college students at Fordham had not yet reached their teens, when President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney decided to resort to techniques developed for the Spanish Inquisition and honed by the Nazis -- "enhanced" methods to use on suspected terrorists.
Here's some background for those just coming of age -- and a refresher for others -- with particular attention to what you should know about John Brennan (College, 1977).
Brennan's Role in Torture
John Brennan had been CIA Director George Tenet's chief of staff for two years when Tenet promoted him to be CIA's Deputy Executive Director in March 2001. In that post he continued to function as one of Tenet's closest aides - after the 9/11 attacks - as President Bush and Vice President Cheney ordered the CIA onto what Cheney (and later Brennan himself) came to call the "dark side."
A Bush Executive Order of Feb. 7, 2002, made the highly dubious claim that al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees were not covered by Geneva Convention protections. And the order had consequences.
On Dec. 11, 2008, Sen. John McCain and Sen. Carl Levin released the summary of a Senate Armed Services Committee report, issued without dissent, indicating that Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, Memorandum, had "opened the way to considering aggressive techniques." And a report of the International Committee of the Red Cross, published in the spring of 2009, recounted in gory detail the torture of so-called "high-value" detainees.
However, back in the early days of the "war on terror," Bush had to choose between rivals for "jurisdiction" and interrogation of such detainees. Tenet was able to use his daily sessions with Bush to win the battle over whether the CIA or the FBI should control the "dark-side" handling of "high-value" detainees. (To be absolutely clear, Tenet wanted it; he got it.)
Recently released documents provide chapter and verse about White House meetings in spring 2002 on the "high-value" detainees, including discussion of a "Guidebook to False Confessions." The main objective was to determine which harsh interrogation techniques would be approved.
Last week, Philip Zelikow openly branded much of what was approved "torture." This was something of a surprise, since Zelikow had been a very close confidant of Bush's national security adviser (and later Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice and is very protective of her.
Chairing the White House meetings on torture techniques, Rice famously sent off the malleable, affable, can-do Tenet with: "This is your baby, go do it." And so he did.
Zelikow later worked for Rice as Counselor of the State Department, where in early 2006 he wrote a memo, the text of which has just been released, which identified several of the CIA interrogation techniques as illegal. Not surprisingly, all copies of that memo were ordered destroyed. But, alas, one was squirreled away, reportedly at State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. It is now available.
Brennan's very close working relationship with then-CIA Director George Tenet on torture issues landed him in the room as Tenet's aide when the "Principals" met in the White House on torture techniques. (It was not until 2003 that Tenet appointed Brennan to head the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, a unit also very much involved with the issue of interrogation.)
The "Principals" included Rice, Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Tenet.
The evidence is overwhelming that Brennan was deeply involved not only in the discussion of various "enhanced interrogation techniques," but also in the planning of the faux-legal memoranda from Ashcroft's Justice Department.
Those "legal opinions" made it possible for George W. Bush to tell NBC's Matt Lauer in November 2010 that waterboarding is legal "because the lawyer said it was legal. ... I'm not a lawyer, but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do."
Reports this week that the Polish government is going after Polish officials who allowed the CIA to establish a black site in Poland for "high-value" detainees brings to mind what Jane Mayer wrote in the New Yorker in 2007 about black sites:
"Among the few C.I.A. officials who knew the details of the detention and interrogation program, there was a tense debate about where to draw the line in terms of treatment. John Brennan, Tenet's former chief of staff, said, 'It all comes down to individual moral barometers.' ...
"Setting aside the moral, ethical, and legal issues, even supporters, such as John Brennan, acknowledge that much of the information that coercion produces is unreliable. As he put it, 'All these methods produced useful information, but there was also a lot that was bogus.'"
Brennan In His Own Words
Perhaps the most damning evidence on Brennan's role in torture, rendition (aka kidnapping), black prisons and such comes from his own mouth. Here are excerpts from the PBS "NewsHour" with Margaret Warner on Dec. 5, 2005:
MARGARET WARNER: This issue [rendition of terrorist suspects to third countries] and the separate one of reported secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe is expected to come up during her [Condoleezza Rice's] five-day European tour. ... So are renditions necessary and effective in fighting terrorism?
JOHN BRENNAN: I think it's an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in. And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.
WARNER: So is it -- are you saying both in two ways -- both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?
BRENNAN: Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them and the U.S. Government will frequently facilitate that movement from one country to another. ...
Quite frankly I think it's rather arrogant to think that we are the best in every case in terms of eliciting information from terror suspects. So other countries and other services have a long experience in dealing with this challenge because they are confronting terrorism on a day-to-day basis.
Oops!
Brennan later tried to square the circle in defending his role in this "dark side" business, in an interview with PBS's Frontline in 2006 in which he spoke directly of CIA Director Tenet's concern to have explicit legal approval for what Zelikow and many others now concede was torture. In fact, Brennan came close to making an "act of contrition," saying:
"Hopefully, that 'dark side' is not going to be something that's going to forever tarnish the image of the United States abroad, and that we're going to look back on this time and regret some of the things that we did, because it is not in keeping with our values."
After Obama assumed office, Brennan was one of those most fiercely opposed to Obama's release of the "torture memos," lest they expose his own guilty knowledge and activist role. The Senate Intelligence Committee started looking into all this several years ago and, reportedly, is still doing so.
All this may be a large part of the reason that President-Elect Barack Obama was told that the Committee already had enough on Brennan to make any confirmation process very painful, should Obama follow through with his original plan to nominate Brennan to be CIA Director.
Audacity of Hope
Some of you may recall that I was privileged to be a passenger on the Audacity of Hope, the U.S. Boat to Gaza, last June. It was a tense time. Stuffing my backpack before flying to Athens, I got a familiar call from a puzzled friend, who said as gently as the words allow, "You know you can get killed, don't you?"
This was not the first such expression of concern. From some others -- who have zero interest in the plight of Gazans, and/or did not wish us passengers well - similar words carried an edge: "Aren't you just asking for it?"
Before I left the U.S., I was pointedly disabused of any notion that the U.S. government would do something to protect us American citizens sailing on an American-flagged boat from the kind of violence used by the Israelis against a similar flotilla led by a Turkish boat in May 2010. As reported to me, the warning came from a source with access to senior officials at the National Security Council.
I was told that the Obama administration planned to do absolutely nothing to protect our boat from Israeli attack or illegal boarding, and that White House officials "would be happy if something happened to us." They were, I was told, "perfectly willing to have the cold corpses of activists shown on American TV."
Can you guess who was the ultimate source? Last week, I went back to my original source and asked if the source could tell me who uttered those words. The answer: John Brennan,
I included mention of that warning in an article I wrote before boarding the boat. The warning stretched credulity to the breaking point for a good friend, former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who blogged:
"While I know Ray to be an extremely honest man, I thought it was possible that his source was exaggerating. I therefore set my own diplomatic sources to work in Washington, without giving them any indication of Ray's information.
"They came back with an independent report from a different source - close to Hillary Clinton rather than the White House - with exactly the same result of which Ray was warned. ... Fatalities would be 'not a problem' for Obama."
That the macho, Israeli-friendly Brennan, turns out to be the White House policy official behind the official bluster surprises me not in the least, though it is nice, I suppose, to have confirmation.
As things turned out, Obama had the presence of mind to seek out and heed some adult advice. After trying unsuccessfully to extract a promise from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to shoot us up, Obama decided to pressure the Greeks to deny us permission to sail for Gaza -- which they did, holding their noses.
Blockade Legal or Illegal?
Were we within our rights? Was/is Israel's sea blockade of Gaza legal under international law? No. And that's why, to its credit, the legal section of our Department of State will not prostitute itself by calling it legal.
On June 24, while we were stranded, literally, in Athens, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland danced around the question at one of the most bizarre press conferences in memory.
AP reporter Matt Lee and some of his colleagues decided to be more matter-of-fact than diplomatic with Nuland, a former national security adviser to Vice President Cheney (from 2003 to 2005) and the wife of neoconservative writer Robert Kagan.
Asked directly, three times, whether the U.S. government considers the Israeli blockade of Gaza legal, Ms. Nuland would give no answer.
"I am not a Law of the Sea expert," she insisted (four times). Her talking points were that the U.S. Boat to Gaza should not be a "repeat of what happened last year" (four times). It was as though last year's flotilla was responsible for the attacks by Israeli naval commandos and this year's flotilla would be considered responsible as well.
Audacity of Hope organizer/leader Ann Wright and I asked Craig Murray for a straightforward opinion on the legality issue, since he is an expert. We knew he had worked on preparing the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and -- more to the point -- that he had become an internationally recognized authority on maritime jurisdiction and naval boarding issues.
When he was Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, he was responsible for giving real-time political and legal clearance to Royal Navy boarding operations in the Persian Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in enforcement of the UN-authorized blockade against Iraqi weapons shipments.
On June 20, 2011, he wrote the following one-paragraph comment and then gave his considered appreciation of the legal situation:
"The boarding of a U.S. flagged ship on the High Seas is something which, in any other circumstances, the U.S. would never tolerate, and I am hoping that it will give (Secretary) Clinton a headache now. ... What is for certain, is that a U.S. court would have jurisdiction over any incidents that happen on board, and I cannot imagine any U.S. judge would renounce that jurisdiction."
Murray then added: "The legal position is plain. A vessel outwith the territorial waters (12-mile limit) of a coastal state is on the high seas under the sole jurisdiction of the flag state of the vessel. The ship has a positive right of passage on the high seas. ... The vessel is entitled to free passage. ...
"This right of free passage is guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, to which the United States is a full party. Any incident that takes place upon a U.S. flagged ship on the High Seas is subject to United States legal jurisdiction. A ship is entitled to look to its flag state for protection from attack on the High Seas."
Law - Quaint; Humans - Real
I don't think Brennan was in the White House bunker with top national security officials on the evening of 9/11, when President Bush set the tone by declaring, "I don't care what the international lawyers say." But, clearly, Brennan caught the drift. And, saddest of all, that tone persists today -- with respect to rendition, as well as on legal niceties like the Law of the Sea.
Granted, now that drones have come into their own, it is much easier to kill folks rather than to capture and "render" them -- like Jesus was rendered to the Romans by the corrupt religious authorities.
Good Friday is a day for pondering such things. While I believe what happened to Jesus gives those of us of Judeo-Christian heritage an additional, highly poignant reason to do so, my atheist friends have warned me against attitudes boarding on snobbery.
One said, "You don't have to be a Christian, Ray, to know instinctively that human beings simply must not torture other human beings." He is right, of course.
And my friend's caution reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Kurt Vonnegut who, at one point named himself Honorary President of the American Humanist Association:
"How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, 'If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?'
"But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being.
"I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake."
This article first appeared on Consortiumnews.com
Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy, justice, and a free press are escalating — putting everything we stand for at risk. We believe a better world is possible, but we can’t get there without your support. Common Dreams stands apart. We answer only to you — our readers, activists, and changemakers — not to billionaires or corporations. Our independence allows us to cover the vital stories that others won’t, spotlighting movements for peace, equality, and human rights. Right now, our work faces unprecedented challenges. Misinformation is spreading, journalists are under attack, and financial pressures are mounting. As a reader-supported, nonprofit newsroom, your support is crucial to keep this journalism alive. Whatever you can give — $10, $25, or $100 — helps us stay strong and responsive when the world needs us most. Together, we’ll continue to build the independent, courageous journalism our movement relies on. Thank you for being part of this community. |
Some of us pause on Good Friday to mark the torture and death of a high-value detainee rendered, extraordinarily, to Roman occupiers.
Although the charges against Jesus of Nazareth were trumped up, the Romans decided to err on the safe side by going to the "dark side." They applied enhanced torture techniques with the ultimate hanging.
I try my best to follow the example set by that fellow from Nazareth. I do get beat up on occasion for "knowing where I stand and standing there," as Dan Berrigan has told us. But I don't expect to be tortured -- much less hung up to die. Those things just happen to folks who don't look like me.
In my worst nightmares I never dreamed that my country of birth, the country I love, would resort to torturing prisoners. Still less, did I expect my alma mater, Fordham University, to honor a person known to have championed kidnapping and torture (as well as illegal eavesdropping on Americans), by inviting him to give the commencement address.
What's the big deal? I have been asked. Aren't you proud to have a fellow Fordham alumnus at the right hand of the President as deputy national security adviser? When I answer, "Not proud, but shamed," I am met with a quizzical look.
When the shock wears off, I realize this should come as no surprise. The findings of a Pew poll conducted three years ago should have accustomed me to the shame. Those polled were white non-Hispanic Catholics, white Evangelicals, and white mainline Protestants. A majority of those who attend church regularly (54 percent) said torture could be "justified," while a majority of those not attending church regularly responded that torture was rarely or never justified.
I let myself wonder whether similar results might obtain, if a similar poll were conducted today at Fordham. And then I remembered that most of the college students at Fordham had not yet reached their teens, when President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney decided to resort to techniques developed for the Spanish Inquisition and honed by the Nazis -- "enhanced" methods to use on suspected terrorists.
Here's some background for those just coming of age -- and a refresher for others -- with particular attention to what you should know about John Brennan (College, 1977).
Brennan's Role in Torture
John Brennan had been CIA Director George Tenet's chief of staff for two years when Tenet promoted him to be CIA's Deputy Executive Director in March 2001. In that post he continued to function as one of Tenet's closest aides - after the 9/11 attacks - as President Bush and Vice President Cheney ordered the CIA onto what Cheney (and later Brennan himself) came to call the "dark side."
A Bush Executive Order of Feb. 7, 2002, made the highly dubious claim that al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees were not covered by Geneva Convention protections. And the order had consequences.
On Dec. 11, 2008, Sen. John McCain and Sen. Carl Levin released the summary of a Senate Armed Services Committee report, issued without dissent, indicating that Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, Memorandum, had "opened the way to considering aggressive techniques." And a report of the International Committee of the Red Cross, published in the spring of 2009, recounted in gory detail the torture of so-called "high-value" detainees.
However, back in the early days of the "war on terror," Bush had to choose between rivals for "jurisdiction" and interrogation of such detainees. Tenet was able to use his daily sessions with Bush to win the battle over whether the CIA or the FBI should control the "dark-side" handling of "high-value" detainees. (To be absolutely clear, Tenet wanted it; he got it.)
Recently released documents provide chapter and verse about White House meetings in spring 2002 on the "high-value" detainees, including discussion of a "Guidebook to False Confessions." The main objective was to determine which harsh interrogation techniques would be approved.
Last week, Philip Zelikow openly branded much of what was approved "torture." This was something of a surprise, since Zelikow had been a very close confidant of Bush's national security adviser (and later Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice and is very protective of her.
Chairing the White House meetings on torture techniques, Rice famously sent off the malleable, affable, can-do Tenet with: "This is your baby, go do it." And so he did.
Zelikow later worked for Rice as Counselor of the State Department, where in early 2006 he wrote a memo, the text of which has just been released, which identified several of the CIA interrogation techniques as illegal. Not surprisingly, all copies of that memo were ordered destroyed. But, alas, one was squirreled away, reportedly at State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. It is now available.
Brennan's very close working relationship with then-CIA Director George Tenet on torture issues landed him in the room as Tenet's aide when the "Principals" met in the White House on torture techniques. (It was not until 2003 that Tenet appointed Brennan to head the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, a unit also very much involved with the issue of interrogation.)
The "Principals" included Rice, Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Tenet.
The evidence is overwhelming that Brennan was deeply involved not only in the discussion of various "enhanced interrogation techniques," but also in the planning of the faux-legal memoranda from Ashcroft's Justice Department.
Those "legal opinions" made it possible for George W. Bush to tell NBC's Matt Lauer in November 2010 that waterboarding is legal "because the lawyer said it was legal. ... I'm not a lawyer, but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do."
Reports this week that the Polish government is going after Polish officials who allowed the CIA to establish a black site in Poland for "high-value" detainees brings to mind what Jane Mayer wrote in the New Yorker in 2007 about black sites:
"Among the few C.I.A. officials who knew the details of the detention and interrogation program, there was a tense debate about where to draw the line in terms of treatment. John Brennan, Tenet's former chief of staff, said, 'It all comes down to individual moral barometers.' ...
"Setting aside the moral, ethical, and legal issues, even supporters, such as John Brennan, acknowledge that much of the information that coercion produces is unreliable. As he put it, 'All these methods produced useful information, but there was also a lot that was bogus.'"
Brennan In His Own Words
Perhaps the most damning evidence on Brennan's role in torture, rendition (aka kidnapping), black prisons and such comes from his own mouth. Here are excerpts from the PBS "NewsHour" with Margaret Warner on Dec. 5, 2005:
MARGARET WARNER: This issue [rendition of terrorist suspects to third countries] and the separate one of reported secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe is expected to come up during her [Condoleezza Rice's] five-day European tour. ... So are renditions necessary and effective in fighting terrorism?
JOHN BRENNAN: I think it's an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in. And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.
WARNER: So is it -- are you saying both in two ways -- both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?
BRENNAN: Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them and the U.S. Government will frequently facilitate that movement from one country to another. ...
Quite frankly I think it's rather arrogant to think that we are the best in every case in terms of eliciting information from terror suspects. So other countries and other services have a long experience in dealing with this challenge because they are confronting terrorism on a day-to-day basis.
Oops!
Brennan later tried to square the circle in defending his role in this "dark side" business, in an interview with PBS's Frontline in 2006 in which he spoke directly of CIA Director Tenet's concern to have explicit legal approval for what Zelikow and many others now concede was torture. In fact, Brennan came close to making an "act of contrition," saying:
"Hopefully, that 'dark side' is not going to be something that's going to forever tarnish the image of the United States abroad, and that we're going to look back on this time and regret some of the things that we did, because it is not in keeping with our values."
After Obama assumed office, Brennan was one of those most fiercely opposed to Obama's release of the "torture memos," lest they expose his own guilty knowledge and activist role. The Senate Intelligence Committee started looking into all this several years ago and, reportedly, is still doing so.
All this may be a large part of the reason that President-Elect Barack Obama was told that the Committee already had enough on Brennan to make any confirmation process very painful, should Obama follow through with his original plan to nominate Brennan to be CIA Director.
Audacity of Hope
Some of you may recall that I was privileged to be a passenger on the Audacity of Hope, the U.S. Boat to Gaza, last June. It was a tense time. Stuffing my backpack before flying to Athens, I got a familiar call from a puzzled friend, who said as gently as the words allow, "You know you can get killed, don't you?"
This was not the first such expression of concern. From some others -- who have zero interest in the plight of Gazans, and/or did not wish us passengers well - similar words carried an edge: "Aren't you just asking for it?"
Before I left the U.S., I was pointedly disabused of any notion that the U.S. government would do something to protect us American citizens sailing on an American-flagged boat from the kind of violence used by the Israelis against a similar flotilla led by a Turkish boat in May 2010. As reported to me, the warning came from a source with access to senior officials at the National Security Council.
I was told that the Obama administration planned to do absolutely nothing to protect our boat from Israeli attack or illegal boarding, and that White House officials "would be happy if something happened to us." They were, I was told, "perfectly willing to have the cold corpses of activists shown on American TV."
Can you guess who was the ultimate source? Last week, I went back to my original source and asked if the source could tell me who uttered those words. The answer: John Brennan,
I included mention of that warning in an article I wrote before boarding the boat. The warning stretched credulity to the breaking point for a good friend, former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who blogged:
"While I know Ray to be an extremely honest man, I thought it was possible that his source was exaggerating. I therefore set my own diplomatic sources to work in Washington, without giving them any indication of Ray's information.
"They came back with an independent report from a different source - close to Hillary Clinton rather than the White House - with exactly the same result of which Ray was warned. ... Fatalities would be 'not a problem' for Obama."
That the macho, Israeli-friendly Brennan, turns out to be the White House policy official behind the official bluster surprises me not in the least, though it is nice, I suppose, to have confirmation.
As things turned out, Obama had the presence of mind to seek out and heed some adult advice. After trying unsuccessfully to extract a promise from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to shoot us up, Obama decided to pressure the Greeks to deny us permission to sail for Gaza -- which they did, holding their noses.
Blockade Legal or Illegal?
Were we within our rights? Was/is Israel's sea blockade of Gaza legal under international law? No. And that's why, to its credit, the legal section of our Department of State will not prostitute itself by calling it legal.
On June 24, while we were stranded, literally, in Athens, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland danced around the question at one of the most bizarre press conferences in memory.
AP reporter Matt Lee and some of his colleagues decided to be more matter-of-fact than diplomatic with Nuland, a former national security adviser to Vice President Cheney (from 2003 to 2005) and the wife of neoconservative writer Robert Kagan.
Asked directly, three times, whether the U.S. government considers the Israeli blockade of Gaza legal, Ms. Nuland would give no answer.
"I am not a Law of the Sea expert," she insisted (four times). Her talking points were that the U.S. Boat to Gaza should not be a "repeat of what happened last year" (four times). It was as though last year's flotilla was responsible for the attacks by Israeli naval commandos and this year's flotilla would be considered responsible as well.
Audacity of Hope organizer/leader Ann Wright and I asked Craig Murray for a straightforward opinion on the legality issue, since he is an expert. We knew he had worked on preparing the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and -- more to the point -- that he had become an internationally recognized authority on maritime jurisdiction and naval boarding issues.
When he was Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, he was responsible for giving real-time political and legal clearance to Royal Navy boarding operations in the Persian Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in enforcement of the UN-authorized blockade against Iraqi weapons shipments.
On June 20, 2011, he wrote the following one-paragraph comment and then gave his considered appreciation of the legal situation:
"The boarding of a U.S. flagged ship on the High Seas is something which, in any other circumstances, the U.S. would never tolerate, and I am hoping that it will give (Secretary) Clinton a headache now. ... What is for certain, is that a U.S. court would have jurisdiction over any incidents that happen on board, and I cannot imagine any U.S. judge would renounce that jurisdiction."
Murray then added: "The legal position is plain. A vessel outwith the territorial waters (12-mile limit) of a coastal state is on the high seas under the sole jurisdiction of the flag state of the vessel. The ship has a positive right of passage on the high seas. ... The vessel is entitled to free passage. ...
"This right of free passage is guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, to which the United States is a full party. Any incident that takes place upon a U.S. flagged ship on the High Seas is subject to United States legal jurisdiction. A ship is entitled to look to its flag state for protection from attack on the High Seas."
Law - Quaint; Humans - Real
I don't think Brennan was in the White House bunker with top national security officials on the evening of 9/11, when President Bush set the tone by declaring, "I don't care what the international lawyers say." But, clearly, Brennan caught the drift. And, saddest of all, that tone persists today -- with respect to rendition, as well as on legal niceties like the Law of the Sea.
Granted, now that drones have come into their own, it is much easier to kill folks rather than to capture and "render" them -- like Jesus was rendered to the Romans by the corrupt religious authorities.
Good Friday is a day for pondering such things. While I believe what happened to Jesus gives those of us of Judeo-Christian heritage an additional, highly poignant reason to do so, my atheist friends have warned me against attitudes boarding on snobbery.
One said, "You don't have to be a Christian, Ray, to know instinctively that human beings simply must not torture other human beings." He is right, of course.
And my friend's caution reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Kurt Vonnegut who, at one point named himself Honorary President of the American Humanist Association:
"How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, 'If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?'
"But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being.
"I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake."
This article first appeared on Consortiumnews.com
Some of us pause on Good Friday to mark the torture and death of a high-value detainee rendered, extraordinarily, to Roman occupiers.
Although the charges against Jesus of Nazareth were trumped up, the Romans decided to err on the safe side by going to the "dark side." They applied enhanced torture techniques with the ultimate hanging.
I try my best to follow the example set by that fellow from Nazareth. I do get beat up on occasion for "knowing where I stand and standing there," as Dan Berrigan has told us. But I don't expect to be tortured -- much less hung up to die. Those things just happen to folks who don't look like me.
In my worst nightmares I never dreamed that my country of birth, the country I love, would resort to torturing prisoners. Still less, did I expect my alma mater, Fordham University, to honor a person known to have championed kidnapping and torture (as well as illegal eavesdropping on Americans), by inviting him to give the commencement address.
What's the big deal? I have been asked. Aren't you proud to have a fellow Fordham alumnus at the right hand of the President as deputy national security adviser? When I answer, "Not proud, but shamed," I am met with a quizzical look.
When the shock wears off, I realize this should come as no surprise. The findings of a Pew poll conducted three years ago should have accustomed me to the shame. Those polled were white non-Hispanic Catholics, white Evangelicals, and white mainline Protestants. A majority of those who attend church regularly (54 percent) said torture could be "justified," while a majority of those not attending church regularly responded that torture was rarely or never justified.
I let myself wonder whether similar results might obtain, if a similar poll were conducted today at Fordham. And then I remembered that most of the college students at Fordham had not yet reached their teens, when President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney decided to resort to techniques developed for the Spanish Inquisition and honed by the Nazis -- "enhanced" methods to use on suspected terrorists.
Here's some background for those just coming of age -- and a refresher for others -- with particular attention to what you should know about John Brennan (College, 1977).
Brennan's Role in Torture
John Brennan had been CIA Director George Tenet's chief of staff for two years when Tenet promoted him to be CIA's Deputy Executive Director in March 2001. In that post he continued to function as one of Tenet's closest aides - after the 9/11 attacks - as President Bush and Vice President Cheney ordered the CIA onto what Cheney (and later Brennan himself) came to call the "dark side."
A Bush Executive Order of Feb. 7, 2002, made the highly dubious claim that al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees were not covered by Geneva Convention protections. And the order had consequences.
On Dec. 11, 2008, Sen. John McCain and Sen. Carl Levin released the summary of a Senate Armed Services Committee report, issued without dissent, indicating that Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, Memorandum, had "opened the way to considering aggressive techniques." And a report of the International Committee of the Red Cross, published in the spring of 2009, recounted in gory detail the torture of so-called "high-value" detainees.
However, back in the early days of the "war on terror," Bush had to choose between rivals for "jurisdiction" and interrogation of such detainees. Tenet was able to use his daily sessions with Bush to win the battle over whether the CIA or the FBI should control the "dark-side" handling of "high-value" detainees. (To be absolutely clear, Tenet wanted it; he got it.)
Recently released documents provide chapter and verse about White House meetings in spring 2002 on the "high-value" detainees, including discussion of a "Guidebook to False Confessions." The main objective was to determine which harsh interrogation techniques would be approved.
Last week, Philip Zelikow openly branded much of what was approved "torture." This was something of a surprise, since Zelikow had been a very close confidant of Bush's national security adviser (and later Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice and is very protective of her.
Chairing the White House meetings on torture techniques, Rice famously sent off the malleable, affable, can-do Tenet with: "This is your baby, go do it." And so he did.
Zelikow later worked for Rice as Counselor of the State Department, where in early 2006 he wrote a memo, the text of which has just been released, which identified several of the CIA interrogation techniques as illegal. Not surprisingly, all copies of that memo were ordered destroyed. But, alas, one was squirreled away, reportedly at State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. It is now available.
Brennan's very close working relationship with then-CIA Director George Tenet on torture issues landed him in the room as Tenet's aide when the "Principals" met in the White House on torture techniques. (It was not until 2003 that Tenet appointed Brennan to head the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, a unit also very much involved with the issue of interrogation.)
The "Principals" included Rice, Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Tenet.
The evidence is overwhelming that Brennan was deeply involved not only in the discussion of various "enhanced interrogation techniques," but also in the planning of the faux-legal memoranda from Ashcroft's Justice Department.
Those "legal opinions" made it possible for George W. Bush to tell NBC's Matt Lauer in November 2010 that waterboarding is legal "because the lawyer said it was legal. ... I'm not a lawyer, but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do."
Reports this week that the Polish government is going after Polish officials who allowed the CIA to establish a black site in Poland for "high-value" detainees brings to mind what Jane Mayer wrote in the New Yorker in 2007 about black sites:
"Among the few C.I.A. officials who knew the details of the detention and interrogation program, there was a tense debate about where to draw the line in terms of treatment. John Brennan, Tenet's former chief of staff, said, 'It all comes down to individual moral barometers.' ...
"Setting aside the moral, ethical, and legal issues, even supporters, such as John Brennan, acknowledge that much of the information that coercion produces is unreliable. As he put it, 'All these methods produced useful information, but there was also a lot that was bogus.'"
Brennan In His Own Words
Perhaps the most damning evidence on Brennan's role in torture, rendition (aka kidnapping), black prisons and such comes from his own mouth. Here are excerpts from the PBS "NewsHour" with Margaret Warner on Dec. 5, 2005:
MARGARET WARNER: This issue [rendition of terrorist suspects to third countries] and the separate one of reported secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe is expected to come up during her [Condoleezza Rice's] five-day European tour. ... So are renditions necessary and effective in fighting terrorism?
JOHN BRENNAN: I think it's an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in. And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.
WARNER: So is it -- are you saying both in two ways -- both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?
BRENNAN: Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them and the U.S. Government will frequently facilitate that movement from one country to another. ...
Quite frankly I think it's rather arrogant to think that we are the best in every case in terms of eliciting information from terror suspects. So other countries and other services have a long experience in dealing with this challenge because they are confronting terrorism on a day-to-day basis.
Oops!
Brennan later tried to square the circle in defending his role in this "dark side" business, in an interview with PBS's Frontline in 2006 in which he spoke directly of CIA Director Tenet's concern to have explicit legal approval for what Zelikow and many others now concede was torture. In fact, Brennan came close to making an "act of contrition," saying:
"Hopefully, that 'dark side' is not going to be something that's going to forever tarnish the image of the United States abroad, and that we're going to look back on this time and regret some of the things that we did, because it is not in keeping with our values."
After Obama assumed office, Brennan was one of those most fiercely opposed to Obama's release of the "torture memos," lest they expose his own guilty knowledge and activist role. The Senate Intelligence Committee started looking into all this several years ago and, reportedly, is still doing so.
All this may be a large part of the reason that President-Elect Barack Obama was told that the Committee already had enough on Brennan to make any confirmation process very painful, should Obama follow through with his original plan to nominate Brennan to be CIA Director.
Audacity of Hope
Some of you may recall that I was privileged to be a passenger on the Audacity of Hope, the U.S. Boat to Gaza, last June. It was a tense time. Stuffing my backpack before flying to Athens, I got a familiar call from a puzzled friend, who said as gently as the words allow, "You know you can get killed, don't you?"
This was not the first such expression of concern. From some others -- who have zero interest in the plight of Gazans, and/or did not wish us passengers well - similar words carried an edge: "Aren't you just asking for it?"
Before I left the U.S., I was pointedly disabused of any notion that the U.S. government would do something to protect us American citizens sailing on an American-flagged boat from the kind of violence used by the Israelis against a similar flotilla led by a Turkish boat in May 2010. As reported to me, the warning came from a source with access to senior officials at the National Security Council.
I was told that the Obama administration planned to do absolutely nothing to protect our boat from Israeli attack or illegal boarding, and that White House officials "would be happy if something happened to us." They were, I was told, "perfectly willing to have the cold corpses of activists shown on American TV."
Can you guess who was the ultimate source? Last week, I went back to my original source and asked if the source could tell me who uttered those words. The answer: John Brennan,
I included mention of that warning in an article I wrote before boarding the boat. The warning stretched credulity to the breaking point for a good friend, former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who blogged:
"While I know Ray to be an extremely honest man, I thought it was possible that his source was exaggerating. I therefore set my own diplomatic sources to work in Washington, without giving them any indication of Ray's information.
"They came back with an independent report from a different source - close to Hillary Clinton rather than the White House - with exactly the same result of which Ray was warned. ... Fatalities would be 'not a problem' for Obama."
That the macho, Israeli-friendly Brennan, turns out to be the White House policy official behind the official bluster surprises me not in the least, though it is nice, I suppose, to have confirmation.
As things turned out, Obama had the presence of mind to seek out and heed some adult advice. After trying unsuccessfully to extract a promise from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to shoot us up, Obama decided to pressure the Greeks to deny us permission to sail for Gaza -- which they did, holding their noses.
Blockade Legal or Illegal?
Were we within our rights? Was/is Israel's sea blockade of Gaza legal under international law? No. And that's why, to its credit, the legal section of our Department of State will not prostitute itself by calling it legal.
On June 24, while we were stranded, literally, in Athens, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland danced around the question at one of the most bizarre press conferences in memory.
AP reporter Matt Lee and some of his colleagues decided to be more matter-of-fact than diplomatic with Nuland, a former national security adviser to Vice President Cheney (from 2003 to 2005) and the wife of neoconservative writer Robert Kagan.
Asked directly, three times, whether the U.S. government considers the Israeli blockade of Gaza legal, Ms. Nuland would give no answer.
"I am not a Law of the Sea expert," she insisted (four times). Her talking points were that the U.S. Boat to Gaza should not be a "repeat of what happened last year" (four times). It was as though last year's flotilla was responsible for the attacks by Israeli naval commandos and this year's flotilla would be considered responsible as well.
Audacity of Hope organizer/leader Ann Wright and I asked Craig Murray for a straightforward opinion on the legality issue, since he is an expert. We knew he had worked on preparing the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and -- more to the point -- that he had become an internationally recognized authority on maritime jurisdiction and naval boarding issues.
When he was Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, he was responsible for giving real-time political and legal clearance to Royal Navy boarding operations in the Persian Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in enforcement of the UN-authorized blockade against Iraqi weapons shipments.
On June 20, 2011, he wrote the following one-paragraph comment and then gave his considered appreciation of the legal situation:
"The boarding of a U.S. flagged ship on the High Seas is something which, in any other circumstances, the U.S. would never tolerate, and I am hoping that it will give (Secretary) Clinton a headache now. ... What is for certain, is that a U.S. court would have jurisdiction over any incidents that happen on board, and I cannot imagine any U.S. judge would renounce that jurisdiction."
Murray then added: "The legal position is plain. A vessel outwith the territorial waters (12-mile limit) of a coastal state is on the high seas under the sole jurisdiction of the flag state of the vessel. The ship has a positive right of passage on the high seas. ... The vessel is entitled to free passage. ...
"This right of free passage is guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, to which the United States is a full party. Any incident that takes place upon a U.S. flagged ship on the High Seas is subject to United States legal jurisdiction. A ship is entitled to look to its flag state for protection from attack on the High Seas."
Law - Quaint; Humans - Real
I don't think Brennan was in the White House bunker with top national security officials on the evening of 9/11, when President Bush set the tone by declaring, "I don't care what the international lawyers say." But, clearly, Brennan caught the drift. And, saddest of all, that tone persists today -- with respect to rendition, as well as on legal niceties like the Law of the Sea.
Granted, now that drones have come into their own, it is much easier to kill folks rather than to capture and "render" them -- like Jesus was rendered to the Romans by the corrupt religious authorities.
Good Friday is a day for pondering such things. While I believe what happened to Jesus gives those of us of Judeo-Christian heritage an additional, highly poignant reason to do so, my atheist friends have warned me against attitudes boarding on snobbery.
One said, "You don't have to be a Christian, Ray, to know instinctively that human beings simply must not torture other human beings." He is right, of course.
And my friend's caution reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Kurt Vonnegut who, at one point named himself Honorary President of the American Humanist Association:
"How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, 'If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?'
"But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being.
"I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake."
This article first appeared on Consortiumnews.com
"What is it going to take for Senate Republicans to oppose this unfit nominee? Every Republican senator who votes to confirm Bove will be complicit in undermining the rule of law and judicial independence."
After a second whistleblower came forward claiming that Emil Bove III instructed attorneys at the U.S. Department of Justice to ignore federal court orders, his critics on Friday renewed calls for the Senate to reject the DOJ official's appointment as an appellate judge.
"Evidence is growing that Emil Bove urged Department of Justice lawyers to ignore federal court orders. That alone should disqualify him from a lifetime appointment to one of the most powerful courts in our country," said Sean Eldridge, president and founder of the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America, in a statement.
U.S. President Donald Trump announced in late May that he would nominate Bove, his former personal attorney, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. Then, last month, a whistleblower complaint was filed by Erez Reuveni, who was fired from the DOJ's Office of Immigration Litigation in April after expressing concerns about the Kilmar Ábrego García case.
On Friday, as the Republican-controlled Senate was moving toward confirming Bove, the group Whistleblower Aid announced that another former Justice Department lawyer, whose name is not being disclosed, "has lawfully disclosed evidence to the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General that corroborates the thrust of the whistleblower claims" from Reuveni.
"Loyalty to one individual must never outweigh supporting and protecting the fundamental rights of those living in the United States."
"What we're seeing here is something I never thought would be possible on such a wide scale: federal prosecutors appointed by the Trump administration intentionally presenting dubious if not outright false evidence to a court of jurisdiction in cases that impact a person's fundamental rights not only under our Constitution, but their natural rights as humans," said Whistleblower Aid chief legal counsel Andrew Bakaj in a statement.
"What this means is that federal career attorneys who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution are now being pressured to abdicate that promise in favor of fealty to a single person, specifically Donald Trump. Loyalty to one individual must never outweigh supporting and protecting the fundamental rights of those living in the United States," Bakaj added. "Our client and Mr. Reuveni are true patriots—prioritizing their commitment to democracy over advancing their careers."
Bove has also faced mounting opposition—including from dozens of former judges—due to his embrace of the so-called "unitary executive theory" as well as his positions on a potential third Trump term and the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by the president's supporters.
The Senate on Thursday voted 50-48 to proceed with the consideration of Bove's nomination. Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) joined all Democrats in opposition. Responding in a statement, Demand Justice interim executive director Maggie Jo Buchanan warned that "Bove will be a stain on the judiciary if confirmed."
"Voting to confirm Trump's judicial nominees to lifetime seats on the federal bench, as he wages a war on the very idea of judicial independence, is an unacceptable choice for any senator who believes in our democracy and the importance of individual rights," said Buchanan, who also blasted the Senate's Tuesday confirmation of Joshua Divine to be a U.S. district judge for the Eastern and Western Districts of Missouri.
"Trump and his MAGA allies are helping him consolidate power in the executive branch, attacking judges who dare to rule against his interests, and targeting Trump's perceived political enemies—all while seemingly unconcerned about the future this sets up for our nation," she stressed. "Every senator will have to decide where they stand when it comes to this assault on our country's values—and that choice will not be forgotten."
After news of the second whistleblower complaint broke on Friday, Stand Up America's Eldridge declared that "again and again, Bove has proven he lacks the temperament, integrity, and independence to serve on the federal bench. He's nothing more than a political foot soldier doing Trump's bidding."
"What is it going to take for Senate Republicans to oppose this unfit nominee?" he added. "Every Republican senator who votes to confirm Bove will be complicit in undermining the rule of law and judicial independence."
"This administration deserves no credit for just barely averting a crisis they themselves set in motion," said one Democratic senator.
While welcoming reporting that the Trump administration will release more than $5 billion in federal funding for schools that it has been withholding for nearly a month, U.S. educators and others said Friday that the funds should never have been held up in the first place and warned that the attempt to do so was just one part of an ongoing campaign to undermine public education.
The Trump administration placed nearly $7 billion in federal education funding for K-12 public schools under review last month, then released $1.3 billion of it last week amid legal action and widespread backlash. An administration official speaking on condition of anonymity told The Washington Post that all reviews of remaining funding are now over.
"There is no good reason for the chaos and stress this president has inflicted on students, teachers, and parents across America for the last month, and it shouldn't take widespread blowback for this administration to do its job and simply get the funding out the door that Congress has delivered to help students," U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said Friday.
"This administration deserves no credit for just barely averting a crisis they themselves set in motion," Murray added. "You don't thank a burglar for returning your cash after you've spent a month figuring out if you'd have to sell your house to make up the difference."
🚨After unlawfully withholding billions in education funding for schools, the Trump Admin. has reversed course.This is a massive victory for students, educators, & families who depend on these essential resources.And it's a testament to public pressure & relentless organizing.
[image or embed]
— Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (@pressley.house.gov) July 25, 2025 at 1:42 PM
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward—which represents plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's funding freeze—said Friday that "if these reports are true, this is a major victory for public education and the communities it serves."
"This news following our legal challenge is a direct result of collective action by educators, families, and advocates across the country," Perryman asserted. "These funds are critical to keeping teachers in classrooms, supporting students in vulnerable conditions, and ensuring schools can offer the programs and services that every child deserves."
"While this development shows that legal and public pressure can make a difference, school districts, parents, and educators should not have to take the administration to court to secure funds for their students," she added. "Our promise to the people remains: We will go to court to protect the rights and well-being of all people living in America."
Democratic Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes—a plaintiff in a separate lawsuit challenging the withholding—attributed the administration's backpedaling to litigatory pressure, arguing that the funding "should never have been withheld in the first place."
They released the 7 B IN SCHOOL FUNDS!! This is a huge win. It means fighting back matters. Fighting for what kids & communities need is always the right thing to do! www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...
[image or embed]
— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten.bsky.social) July 25, 2025 at 11:46 AM
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association—the largest U.S. labor union—said in a statement: "Playing games with students' futures has real-world consequences. School districts in every state have been scrambling to figure out how they will continue to meet student needs without this vital federal funding, and many students in parts of the country have already headed back to school. These reckless funding delays have undermined planning, staffing, and support services at a time when schools should be focused on preparing students for success."
"Sadly, this is part of a broader pattern by this administration of undermining public education—starving it of resources, sowing distrust, and pushing privatization at the expense of the nation's most vulnerable students," Pringle added. "And they are doing this at the same time Congress has passed a budget bill that will devastate our students, schools, and communities by slashing funds meant for public education, healthcare, and keeping students from their school meals—all to finance massive tax breaks for billionaires."
While expanding support for private education, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump earlier this month weakens public school programs including before- and after-school initiatives and services for English language learners.
"Sadly, this is part of a broader pattern by this administration of undermining public education."
Trump also signed an executive order in March directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin the process of shutting down the Department of Education—a longtime goal of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led roadmap for a far-right takeover and gutting of the federal government closely linked to Trump, despite his unconvincing efforts to distance himself from the highly controversial and unpopular plan.
Earlier this week, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office determined that the U.S. Health and Human Services Department illegally impounded crucial funds from the Head Start program, which provides comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and other services to low-income families.
"Instead of spending the last many weeks figuring out how to improve after-school options and get our kids' reading and math scores up, because of President Trump, communities across the country have been forced to spend their time cutting back on tutoring options and sorting out how many teachers they will have to lay off," Murray noted.
"It's time for President Trump, Secretary McMahon, and [Office of Management and Budget Director] Russ Vought to stop playing games with students' futures and families' livelihoods—and end their illegal assault on our students and their schools," the senator added.
"You want history books to not record you as an evil genocide supporter?" said one organizer. "You need to actually make an impact, NOW."
U.S. college students are still facing punishment for protesting Israel's U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza and its starvation of more than 2 million Palestinians there, with Columbia University announcing this week the suspension and expulsion of dozens of students who spoke out over the past year.
But a number of observers have pointed to a shift in the rhetoric of some of the student organizers' biggest detractors in recent days, with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton notably saying Thursday that "thousands of children in Gaza are at risk of starvation while trucks full of food sit waiting across the border" and calling for "the full flow of humanitarian assistance" to be restored.
Clinton didn't mention the Israeli blockade that has kept food from reaching Palestinians, more than 120 of whom have now died of starvation, or the at least $12.5 billion in military aid the U.S. has provided to Israel since the blockade first began in October 2023—in violation of U.S. laws prohibiting the government from giving military aid to countries that block humanitarian aid.
The former Democratic presidential nominee also didn't acknowledge the remarks she made in May 2024 about the campus protests that were spreading across the country, with students demanding that their schools divest from companies that work with the Israeli government and that the country end its support for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
At the time, Clinton said students who oppose Israel's policies in Gaza and the West Bank "don't know very much" about the conflict there. Clinton and other politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties have repeated the familiar phrase, "Israel has a right to defend itself" as the IDF has attacked so-called "safe zones," hospitals, and refugee camps.
Some suggested her comments on Thursday appeared to be those of an influential political figure who's come to a realization about the situation that both the Biden and Trump administrations, with bipartisan support from Congress, have helped to bring about in Gaza.
"Seems mostly like all the recent photos of starving children are responsible for this shift, though humanitarian aid groups have been warning about this for months and months," said Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein.
One observer said Clinton and a number of European leaders are speaking out now because Israel has already "carried out their final solution."
As Common Dreams reported this week, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has said that 85% of people in Gaza are now in Phase 5 of famine, defined at "an extreme deprivation of food."
New York Times columnist Megan Stack said she welcomed anyone who is "[waking] up" to the reality of man-made mass starvation made possible by U.S. support, but called it "an absolute indictment of the center-left, such as it is, that it took pictures of dying, skeletal babies with trash bags for diapers to muster this pale response."
"Subtext: We can stomach mass bombings, but starvation is a bridge too far," said Stack.
The comments from Clinton coincided with a shift in the corporate media's coverage of Gaza, with major outlets focusing heavily on the impact of starvation.
Organizer and attorney Aaron Regunberg said that instead of simply doing "reputational damage control by speaking up in these very last moments," powerful political leaders must "shut shit down."
"You want history books to not record you as an evil genocide supporter?" said Regunberg. "One speech now—after countless speeches condemning those who have been speaking out—ain't gonna cut it... You need to go to Gaza. You need to actually make an impact, NOW."
Progressive organizer Lindsey Boylan wondered whether establishment leaders "will ever admit that smearing all protests to stop the genocide actually contributed to the genocide."
"Few people could have played a more pivotal role in shaping the democratic response to prevent genocide," said Boylan of Clinton's comments. "Now here we are. Watching mass death of kids."
On Friday, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has consistently demanded that the Biden and Trump administrations stop funding Israel's assault on Gaza and warned of the impact mass starvation would have, issued his latest call for U.S. support to end immediately.
"American taxpayer dollars are being used to starve children, bomb civilians, and support the cruelty of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and his criminal ministers," said Sanders. "Enough is enough. The White House and Congress must immediately act to end this war using the full scope of American influence. No more military aid to the Netanyahu government. History will condemn those who fail to act in the face of this horror."