State Dept Evasive When Pressed on ‘PR’ Letter to Israel

Miller refuses to clarify what Israel supposedly has to do, or what the alleged consequences will be if they refuse

Decensored News Oct 16

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On Monday, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent a letter to Israel about their alleged “deep concern” over “the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza.”

It was then “leaked” by Axios reporter Barak Ravid — a veteran of Israel’s Unit 8200 — on Tuesday, who characterized it as a “demand” that Israel “takes steps within 30 days… in order to avoid consequences in U.S. law for U.S. military aid to Israel.”

Asked about the letter at Tuesday’s press briefing, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller admitted a long-established fact — that the humanitarian aid that Israel is allowing to reach Palestinians in Gaza is at “very, very low levels” and that the situation is “dire.”

He claimed that the election is “not a factor at all” in the timing of this letter, and implied that the fact that the 30-day implementation “window” ends after the election is purely coincidental.

Confronted by a CNN reporter about the fact that this man-made crisis is not new, and that Israel has been blocking huge amounts of aid for months, Miller claimed they have “been having a number of ongoing conversations with” the Israelis prior to this letter.

(We have no way to verify that claim, but if that's true then it suggests that they knowingly failed to take the necessary action – or even give Israel an ultimatum – for months.)

Miller also refused to address what will supposedly happen if Israel doesn't start letting more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Q: “And the consequence if they don't do that is what?”

Miller: “So — I'm not going to speak to that today...” [long non-answer]

Q: “Um, yeah, but.... what's the consequence?”

Miller: “There are implications under US law, under policy, that I'm not gonna speak to here...”

Moreover, he refused to clarify what Israel supposedly has to do with regard to humanitarian aid to avoid potentially facing these vague alleged consequences (that he won't articulate either).

CNN’s Kylie Atwood: “You're not going to lay out what that mark of success would look like?”

The letter lays out a list of “measures,” and says failure to “demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures” may have legal implications.

It doesn't say they “must implement” them — just that they should “demonstrate” a “commitment to” doing so.

Watch their actions

“Rather than releasing this information itself, the Biden administration published it in its customary manner by laundering it through Axios as a letter that was ‘obtained’ by the outlet and its Israeli intelligence insider Barak Ravid, thereby framing this as a news story and not a White House press release,” writes Caitlin Johnstone.

“If this was a real thing with real teeth and not an incredibly cynical eleventh-hour election ploy, it would have happened a full year ago,” she says, calling it just “another phony Biden PR stunt”:

The Biden administration’s actions speak for themselves, and have done so for a year. Ignore their words. Watch their actions. If you just look at the material actions of the US government and Israel and mentally mute all their mountains of verbiage about it, you simply see a big country pouring weapons into a little country who uses them to attack its neighbors (…) a state raining hellfire on civilian populations packed full of children and using siege warfare to starve hundreds of thousands of people.

Ignore their words and watch their actions. That’s how you sort out fact from fiction in an information environment that’s saturated in propaganda and manipulation — not just with Israel, but with everything. Watch where the war machinery is going, where the money is going, and where the resources are going, and ignore all the words about why it makes perfect sense for this to be happening. Do this and you’ll have an infinitely better understanding of what’s going on in the world than you could ever hope to glean from watching CNN or Fox News.

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