Category Archives: defense policy

One More Reason

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For Israel to not trust the Biden-Harris administration.

The United States is investigating the unauthorized release of classified documents detailing Israel’s planned attack against Iran, The Associated Press reported.
The documents, attributed to the US Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, note that Israel was still moving military assets in place to conduct a military strike in response to Iran’s blistering ballistic missile attack on Oct. 1. ….
The documents, which are marked Top Secret, were posted to the Telegram messaging app last week and first reported by CNN and Axios.

Supposedly, the Biden-Harris is investigating the leak, including how the data were obtained.

…whether it was an intentional leak by a member of the US intelligence community or by another method, like a hack….

Either way, this administration cannot be trusted with anyone’s secrets.

If the leak came from the administration’s intelligence community—I’m particularly suspicious, on the basis of no data whatsoever, of the NSA—that leaker should spend the rest of his life in prison, and this is would be yet another example of why the intelligence community needs a deep- and wide-reaching reform along with removal of managers from the mid-level on up to the political appointees, along with the cancelation of their security clearances once they’re no longer in government employ.

If the leak was the result of a hack job, it would be yet another demonstration of this administration’s disdain for matters relating to cyber security.

Hopefully, though, the Israelis already have learned the level of trustworthiness of this administration, and they shared false flag information in the expectation that Biden-Harris’ minions would leak them, or that they’d be hacked, and therewith mislead Iran regarding Israel’s actual plans.

Misleading Headline

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And a misleading article. The headline summarizes the miss:

Israel Said It Was Aiming at Hezbollah. Its Strike Also Killed Dozens of Civilians.

And the lede, which in keeping with newsroom policy across the journalism guild, misleadingly calls the terrorist entity “militants:”

For years, a helpful, middle-aged man lived in the basement apartment of a seven-story residential building on a hillside. Some neighbors in Ain el-Delb said they knew that he was connected to Hezbollah, the militant group. But they said they didn’t think he was important enough to be an Israeli target.

Misleading because what these newsroom writers carefully chose not to mention, at any point in the article other than a passing reference to Israel’s “describing” the building as a headquarters, is that Hezbollah had secreted its facilities and terrorists in apartment building among those civilians, using them as shields. It’s those terrorists who are responsible for the extent of the civilian deaths. It’s those terrorists who maximized the extent of the collateral damage centered on those civilian deaths.

Yahya Sinwar is Dead

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Israel got him in Rafah last Thursday, and the hue and cry in the press, in our government, and in the opposition in Israel is to move quickly to negotiate with Hamas to get hostages back. The “thinking” is that Hamas is running out of leaders to run the terrorist entity and that it’s in a severely weakened state and so ripe for negotiations.

This is badly mistaken.

For one thing, there remain tens of thousands of Hamas terrorists, and included among them are thousands of middle- and senior-level terrorist combat (to use the term loosely and metaphorically) leaders who can be moved up. Hamas also can hire leadership, if only into second echelon levels to get them trained up to Hamas’ methods, from outside: al Qaeda is still a going concern, Daesh is still a going concern, al Shebaab is a going concern. The Muslim Brotherhood continues.

For another thing, Hamas has no incentive for negotiating a release of the hostages they still hold. Releasing them, under any terms however favorable to the terrorists, takes away their last lever over the Israeli opposition. Nor does Hamas have any other incentive for the release: they don’t care about the hostages’ fate or their own; the terrorists only care about the destruction of Israel. One of their senior leaders (not Sinwar) has already promised to repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated, no matter the cost in Palestinian lives or their own.

No.

Hamas is in a weakened state, but that means it’s no time to let up. On the contrary, now is the time to pile on, for the IDF, and for the US to actively support the IDF with our own military forces. Let Hamas come to Israel with a wish to negotiate. It’s Hamas’ war, it’s on Israel to finish it on their terms, it’s on us to help them (France and the rest of Europe be damned) and it’s on Hamas to ask for negotiations. Or to suffer the fate it has promised Israel.

“War Crimes”

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As Eugene Kontorovich’s (of Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum and George Mason University Scalia Law School) in his lede notes,

[A]s Israel fights Hezbollah’s army in Lebanon, it has found a new foe: the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. Having failed at its mission of neutralizing the Hezbollah threat, Unifil is now actively interfering with Israel doing the job.

Never mind that, per the UN’s Security Council, UNIFIL’s mandate includes

ensuring that no “armed groups” operate in southern Lebanon

Those barred armed groups include Hezbollah. Instead, UNIFIL

has allowed Hezbollah to entrench itself in southern Lebanon over the years, storing arms in many of the homes and building a network of fully stocked attack tunnels and small outdoor weapons depots in preparation for an Oct. 7-style assault. Israeli troops have found a tunnel about 100 meters from a Unifil outpost.
For 11 months Hezbollah fired more than 8,500 rockets and missiles at Israel, mostly from southern Lebanon, under Unifil’s nose. The area, militia-free by order of the UN Security Council, was soon crawling with the world’s best-armed terrorists. But the peacekeepers said little and did less.

Not just 100m away. In the IDF’s current move into southern Lebanon,

Israeli forces discovered Hezbollah tunnel entrances abutting Unifil posts.

Kontorovich is being generous. UNIFIL has not failed. It has been succeeding, in its internally defined mission to support Hezbollah and to operate against Israel.

Thus, war crimes. UNIFIL, via its conscious decision to abrogate its assignment of keeping Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon, and its equally conscious decision to shield Hezbollah politically and lately to attempt physical shielding, is the one committing war crimes. UNIFIL’s guilt is made manifest by its decision to allow Hezbollah to build tunnels for attacking Israel right up against UNIFIL buildings to contribute to those tunnels’ disguise.

UNIFIL is not the only entity guilty of war crimes, though. UN Secretary General António Guterres shares that guilt with his open support for UNIFIL, and for UNRWA, many of whose members are part of the planners for Hamas’ 7 Oct 23 atrocity and ensuing atrocities throughout the last year, and through them his personal support for terrorists and the terrorists’ atrocities.

Drones Over our Domestic Military Bases

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Now we’re getting reports, and sightings, of drones flying over our military bases, installations like the East Coast Langley Air Force Base.

For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the US The show usually starts 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, another senior leader told [USAF General Mark] Kelly.

And

Two months earlier, in October 2023, five drones flew over a government site used for nuclear-weapons experiments.

No one in our government has any idea of the origin or purpose of the drone overflights, but that isn’t the worst of this. Instead, while the overflights are illegal,

Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the US unless they pose an imminent threat.

This is the worst of it, and this law needs to be changed. Aside from the obvious—espionage flights over our military bases are most certainly an imminent, as well as a long-term threat—in a conflict, those drones will be armed but otherwise indistinguishable from the drones that have illegally flying over our bases for some time.