SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
propublica
Report Says Biden's 'Empty Threats' on Gaza Fed Israeli Impunity
One Middle East expert said that it's "hard to avoid the conclusion" that the U.S. administration's ultimatums to Israel "have all just been a smokescreen."
Jan 15, 2025
New reporting published Wednesday details the impotence and insincerity of President Joe Biden's "multiple threats, warnings, and admonishments" to Israel as it annihilated the Gaza Strip, killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians while receiving tens of billions of dollars in U.S. arms and unwavering diplomatic support.
Writing for ProPublica, Brett Murphy showed how multiple "red lines" issued by Biden administration officials were ignored by Israel with impunity. Murphy highlighted Secretary of State Antony Blinken's October 2024 demand that Israel take "urgent and sustained actions" to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza—mainly by allowing far more aid into the embattled strip—within 30 days or face a military aid cutoff.
"Netanyahu's conclusion was that Biden doesn't have enough oomph to make him pay a price."
Thirty days came and went without significant improvement or letup in Israel's onslaught. Yet the Biden administration insisted it found no indication that Israel was using U.S.-supplied weapons illegally. The arms flow continued.
As Murphy reported:
That choice was immediately called into question. On November 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel's methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was "consistent with genocide." Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations.
"Government officials worry Biden's record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity," wrote Murphy.
This reporting is so utterly damning. www.propublica.org/article/bide...
[image or embed]
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes.bsky.social) January 15, 2025 at 1:55 PM
Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, told Murphy that "Netanyahu's conclusion was that Biden doesn't have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him."
"Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying 'no' to the current president," al-Omari added.
Conversely, Murphy noted: "On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now, and who deserves the most credit, it's plausible that [U.S. President-elect Donald] Trump's imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line."
"Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months," he added, "raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives."
As Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, told Murphy, "It's hard to avoid the conclusion that [Biden's] red lines have all just been a smokescreen."
"The Biden administration decided to be all-in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something," Walt added, as Israel kept killing Palestinians with U.S.-supplied weapons and continued a "complete siege" blamed for widespread starvation and sickness in the Gaza Strip.
Murphy wrote that Trump "will inherit a demoralized State Department" in which many officials who haven't already resignedhave "become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented."
As one senior department official told Murphy, Gaza "is the human rights atrocity of our time."
"I work for the department that's responsible for this policy. I signed up for this," the official added. "I don't deserve sympathy for it."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Georgia Fires Entire Maternal Mortality Panel After Reporting on Abortion Ban Deaths
"This is how they cover up what abortion bans do—fire anyone who helps tell the stories of harm," said one journalist. "Everyone who is or can be pregnant will pay the price."
Nov 21, 2024
Georgia officials fired everyone on the Maternal Mortality Review Committee after ProPublicareported that the panel found the deaths of two women whose care was restricted by the state's abortion ban were preventable, the news outlet revealed Thursday.
ProPublica first exposed the committee's findings for Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller in September, sparking a flood of criticism directed at abortion care restrictions and the primarily Republican politicians who impose them. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, who was running for the White House, even traveled to Atlanta to pay tribute to the two women.
"They didn't like that reporters found out that the state's ban killed two women."
Thurman and Miller's stories, as the news outlet acknowledged Thursday, "became a central discussion" in not only the presidential contest—ultimately won by Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who has bragged about the role he played in reversing Roe v. Wade—but also ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights in 10 states, seven of which succeeded.
In a November 8 letter obtained by ProPublica, Georgia Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey wrote that an "investigation was unable to uncover which individual(s) disclosed confidential information" despite state law and confidential agreements signed by panel members barring such disclosures.
Toomey explained that the committee was immediately "disbanded," a replacement panel will be formed through a new application process, and additional procedures are under consideration regarding confidentiality, oversight, and organizational structure.
ProPublica reported that the office of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp—who appointed Toomey—declined to comment and referred questions to the health department, whose spokesperson also declined to comment, saying that the letter, "speaks for itself."
As the outlet detailed:
Reproductive rights advocates say Georgia's decision to dismiss and restructure its committee also could have a chilling effect on the committee's work, potentially dissuading its members from delving as deeply as they have into the circumstances of pregnant women's deaths if it could be politically sensitive.
"They did what they were supposed to do. This is why we need them," said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, one of the groups challenging Georgia's abortion ban in court. "To have this abrupt disbandment, my concern is what we are going to lose in the process, in terms of time and data?"
Other reproductive rights advocates and journalists were similarly critical in response to the new reporting from ProPublica—which has also covered the deaths of two women in Texas: Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain.
"Women died because they received no life-saving care as they were having miscarriages in Georgia and the state responded by simply eradicating the committee that investigated deaths of pregnant women," declared writer and organizer Hannah Riley.
The National Institute for Reproductive Health, an advocacy group, asserted that "when anti-abortion politicians find FACTS inconvenient, they dismantle the systems meant to hold them accountable."
New York magazine senior correspondent Irin Carmon, whose forthcoming book is about pregnancy in the United States, similarly said: "This is how they cover up what abortion bans do—fire anyone who helps tell the stories of harm. Everyone who is or can be pregnant will pay the price."
Jessica Valenti, author of the newsletterAbortion, Every Day and the bookAbortion, also argued that Georgia officials fired the panel members because "they didn't like that reporters found out that the state's ban killed two women."
"I wrote about this in my book—this is how they cover up our deaths," Valenti continued. "In Idaho, they disbanded the Maternal Mortality Review Committee altogether; in Texas, they put a well-known anti-abortion activist on there to skew the data."
"I guarantee you that when Georgia replaces those seats on the Maternal Mortality Review Committee, they're going to put anti-abortion activists on there," she added. "Just watch."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'MAGA Abortion Bans Kill Women': Pregnant Texas Teen Dead After Care Denied
"Make no mistake Donald Trump's abortion ban did this," said one reproductive rights leader. "We must stop him."
Nov 01, 2024
Nevaeh Crain would have turned 20 on Friday. Instead, she is yet another American woman killed by a Republican abortion ban.
After reporting on Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, who died because of a Georgia ban enacted in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court reversingRoe v. Wade in 2022, ProPublica turned to Texas, sharing the stories of Josseli Barnica and Crain, who died at 18 years old last year, having endured a sepsis complication, the miscarriage of a daughter she planned to name Lillian, and delayed medical care.
"On the morning of their baby shower, October 28, 2023, Crain woke with a headache," ProPublica reported Friday. Soon vomiting with a fever, she sought care at two Texas hospitals a total of three times over 20 hours. As the outlet detailed: "On her third trip, a doctor insisted on two ultrasounds to 'confirm fetal demise' before moving her to intensive care. Hours later, Crain died."
As journalists Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana explained:
ProPublica condensed more than 800 pages of Crain's medical records into a four-page timeline in consultation with two maternal-fetal medicine specialists; reporters reviewed it with nine doctors, including researchers at prestigious universities, OB-GYNs who regularly handle miscarriages, and experts in emergency medicine and maternal health.
Some said the first ER missed warning signs of infection that deserved attention. All said that the doctor at the second hospital should never have sent Crain home when her signs of sepsis hadn't improved. And when she returned for the third time, all said there was no medical reason to make her wait for two ultrasounds before taking aggressive action to save her.
"This is how these restrictions kill women," said Dr. Dara Kass, a former regional director at the Department of Health and Human Services and an emergency room physician in New York. "It is never just one decision, it's never just one doctor, it's never just one nurse."
Crain and her mother, Candace Fails, "believed abortion was morally wrong," according to ProPublica. "The teen could only support it in the context of rape or life-threatening illness, she used to tell her mother. They didn't care whether the government banned it, just how their Christian faith guided their own actions."
Fails told the reporters that she still thought the doctors were obligated to do everything they could to save Crain, even if it meant losing the pregnancy, but they seemed more concerned with the fetal heartbeat. "I know it sounds selfish, and God knows I would rather have both of them, but if I had to choose," she said, "I would have chosen my daughter."
Although a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), requires emergency departments that accept Medicare to provide patients with "necessary stabilizing treatment," which the Biden-Harris administration argues includes abortions, The Associated Pressrevealed in August that over 100 patients nationwide have been "turned away or negligently treated since 2022."
Republican officials in multiple states, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, have fought against the Biden-Harris administration's interpretation of EMLATA, and last month the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower court decision barring emergency abortions that violate Texas law.
ProPublica's reporting on Crain's death comes as early voting is underway for the November 5 elections. American voters are set to choose the next president—former Republican President Donald Trump or Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris—and which party controls each chamber of Congress.
Democrats have heavily campaigned on reproductive freedom, highlighting that Trump appointed three of the justices behind the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision that ended nationwide abortion rights and he plans to vote against a Florida ballot measure that would outlaw pre-viability abortion bans in the state, where a six-week restriction is now in effect. In September, Harris, a former U.S. senator, endorsed eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe.
The GOP controls the U.S. House of Representatives but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has held recent votes forcing Republicans to go on record against federal bills that would protect abortion care, birth control, and fertility treatments. Texas Congressman Colin Allred, the Democrat challenging U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), took note of Crain's story on Friday.
"This is tragic. My heart goes out to Nevaeh's family," Allred said on social media. "Texas doctors can't do their jobs because of Ted Cruz's cruel abortion ban. Cruz even lobbied SCOTUS to allow states to ban life-saving emergency abortions. We can't afford six more years of Ted Cruz."
Others also responded to the new reporting by directing ire at anti-choice Republican officials working to restrict reproductive care.
"This latest story from ProPublica about Nevaeh Crain is gutting," said Cecile Richards, co-founder of Abortion in America and former president of Planned Parenthood. "She was a teenager who should be alive today, and isn't, because of Texas' abortion bans and refusal to provide lifesaving care even in a dire emergency."
Congresswoman Gwen Moore (D-Wis.)—who has publicly shared her own pre-Roe abortion story—declared that "MAGA abortion bans KILL WOMEN."
Center for American Progress' Alex Wall similarly said: "This is sickening. Nevaeh Crain should be alive today. Donald Trump's MAGA abortion bans are killing women."
Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, which has endorsed Harris, stressed that "these Republican monsters in Texas fought the Biden-Harris administration efforts to protect women like Nevaeh and Josseli."
"There is a special place in hell for Ken Paxton," she continued, calling out the Texas attorney general. "Make no mistake Donald Trump's abortion ban did this. We must stop him."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular