The D.C. blame game is about avoiding responsibility while protecting a policy that is written in blood
The continuing proliferation of conflicting and contradictory stories leaked by U.S. intelligence services regarding what they knew—and, more importantly, didn’t know—about the planning for Hamas’ assault on Israel, is more than just a D.C. bureaucratic comedy act. Taken together, the profusion of leaks suggests there are people in offices and agencies across the Beltway who are worried they’ll be blamed for missing signals and human intelligence outlining plans for the largest one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
The gaps in U.S. knowledge of the attacks and Iran’s role must also be understood in the context of a separate but related intelligence scandal. As Tablet reported six days before the attacks, the Biden administration’s former Iran envoy Robert Malley supported and facilitated an Iranian spy ring and brought one of the clerical regime’s assets, Ariane Tabatabai, into the government. She is still at the Pentagon, where as chief of staff to the assistant director of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier, she holds top secret clearances. It’s hardly surprising then that the administration is eager to conceal Iran’s supporting role in the Hamas operation and clear the American spy services of any foreknowledge of the murderous incursion of the Iranian-backed terrorist group into southern Israel, no matter how unlikely such claims are in reality.
“We were not tracking this,” a senior U.S. military official told NBC News the day of the attacks. “There’s no particular reason why the U.S. would be training enormous intelligence assets on Hamas, which has never been a threat to us,” former U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross insisted. “It’s pretty hard to say this was a failure on our part. But I think it’s unmistakable that it’s an Israeli intelligence failure.”
Indeed, Israel’s own failures are plain and glaring. At least 1,400 Israelis were killed within Israel’s borders, and the country’s intelligence officials will have to answer to the Israeli public, and investigators, for the massive intelligence and operational failures that led to the slaughter of civilians on a massive scale.
But Ross is wrong: Hamas has long been an obvious threat to the United States and to American lives. Indeed, Hamas violence against Americans is why Congress passed the 2018 Taylor Force Act to prevent the United States from funding the “Pay for Slay” program by which hundreds of Hamas terrorists and their families benefited directly from over half a billion American taxpayer dollars that the United States funnels to the Palestinian Authority.
And the Palestinian terror group has killed Americans before the 30 it slaughtered on Oct. 7, including 3-month-old Chaya Zissel Braun who was murdered at a Jerusalem light rail stop in October 2014 when a Hamas member drove a car into the stroller pushed by the child’s mother.
It’s also not true the United States doesn’t train enormous intelligence assets on Hamas. As everyone now knows, the NSA collects on virtually everyone in the world. Further, the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East is in Qatar at Al Udeid Air Base, which is also the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command. The Gulf emirate hosts Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, and former chief Khaled Mashal, to the consternation of many who wonder why Washington lets Qatar get away with its double game. U.S. intelligence officials believe that it’s easier to keep tabs on Haniyeh in Qatar where they have plenty of visibility into what he’s doing. And yet according to U.S. officials, they weren’t tracking Hamas?
So what about the claims that the United States knew nothing about the attack—but that U.S. allies like Egypt were indeed aware, and warned Israel?
None of those stories add up, either.....
