The Biden Administration (No Lago)

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Actually the latest leaks have been in response to white house press briefings claiming that Israel is a perfect and sinless nation that has committed no war crimes in the last six months, not even 1!

Leak says fuck you higher ups you are secretly sitting on a bunch of recent official reports about Israeli war crimes you are refusing to acknowledge some of which date back to even before October 7th.

The leaks are not always back handed press briefings.

[Kaelik]

Today I learned there is a specific sub group of the State Department that exists solely to take in Leahy violations in relation specifically to Israel and then never ever ever ever ever ever ever produce an evaluation result, so they never have to acknowledge that it's illegal under US law to arm Israel.

It's called the "Israel Leahy Vetting Forum"

[Kaelik]

The Biden admin responded to Columbia university evicting students with no notice in violation of state law and ordering the cops to go in and bust heads so bad that the NYPD kept suggesting maybe Columbia should chill out by saying how the protesters deserve it:

"While every American has the right to peaceful protest, calls for violence and physical intimidation targeting Jewish students and the Jewish community are blatantly Antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous - they have absolutely no place on any college campus, or anywhere in the United States of America. And echoing the rhetoric of terrorist organizations, especially in the wake of the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, is despicable. We condemn these statements in the strongest terms."

What calls for violence? Whatever the press offices made up, we don't need to think about which ones. Just call all the jewish people protesting antisemitic and move on to the part where you say the protest is despicable and move on.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

What calls for violence?

The idiots in power think they can just say that enough and then they can start imprisoning peace activists and using them as pretexts for their own bad actions and excuses for their own failures. They already have been using them as pretexts, and they are very clearly psyching themselves up to imprison them in large numbers. Probably when the shit hits the fan with a couple of extra zeros on the end of the civilian death toll when Raffa is attacked.

The repeat it three times on cable news and it becomes true thing is seriously wishful thinking by the worst idiots working in PR. Propaganda wars are more complex than that now, audiences are much more discerning. People say its tech, but really its the long term effect of how Iraq and the post Iraq media landscape was handled.

They destroyed their credibility but they act like they think they have more now than ever just because they purged all anti-war anti-empire voices from the main stream after Iraq. But it just made them look even less credible and fed into alternative news sources becoming so big, and it is already biting them hard in the ass.

How much more does the living in fake news as if it is reality strategy have to hurt their chances of re-election and their ability to even have international diplomacy, or even international trade? What will it take before they decide maybe you cannot actually make your policy decisions as if your propaganda campaigns are real?

[PseudoStupidity]

They just arrested a bunch of students at Yale for protesting against the genocide, so a point for PL on guessing mass incarceration for protesting college students. I wonder if we'll get another Kent State or if it'll "just" be mass arrests of peaceful protestors who oppose our genocidal government. We'll probably be seeing more protests now that we're going to be sending another 20 billion or so to Israel. Expect lots of images of cops brutalizing college students.

Stay safe if you're protesting, folks.

[Kaelik]

Obviously there are a million ways we know the police are full of shit, but one way is that there have been so many successful dearrests by protestors surrounding cop vans.

If anyone really thought the people being arrested were actually a threat to anyone they probably wouldn't just release them as soon as they get surrounded.

[Kaelik]

Obviously there's a million horrible things the US has been doing, and things are really bad, but as Israel steps up it's genocide in Rafah and the Biden admin cosigns it, the Biden has steadfastly refused to enforce the Leahy Act and after a lot of pressure finally issued the reports from BEFORE October 7 that it buried which list a bunch of Israeli war crimes, agree that they were done with US weapons, but say they can keep arming Israel because the Israeli Occupation Army has done enough to remedy those war crimes.

That's not what the Leahy Act says, it doesn't say the US can't army war criminals unless the war criminals moderately discipline some low level soldiers. But the Biden admin is perfectly willing to break the law whenever it's about something important, like doing a genocide they really want to do, instead of when it's about something unimportant like women having reproductive rights.

This is also obviously an untenable position in the wake of the ongoing genocide where Israel commits new war crimes every day. They obviously didn't remedy the war crimes before October 7th sufficiently because the same people are committing new war crimes right now!

Anyway, rumors were spread and have now been confirmed, that the ICC is putting out arrest warrants against Netenyahu. When they were just rumors Biden said the ICC doesn't have jurisdiction. Which isn't true, because the entire point of the fucking thing is that it's universal jurisdiction. The ICC is not the same as every other international body. Everyone agrees that most International Treaties apply only to the signatories, but the ICC was created explicitly in the tradition of the Nuremburg Trials, it's a body intentionally designed to prosecute things even in states that didn't agree in advance to be subject.

So what Biden means when he says that the ICC "doesn't have jurisdiction" is that the US army will damn well preform a special operations to break Netenyahu out of jail if some OTHER signatory of the Rome Treaty enforces the warrant. I say other, because the US did sign it, but then unsigned it. A thing of questionable legal validity, but also who fucking cares because the US has never at any point intended to enforce the ICC against any of our allies, it's just a thing Biden says is good when it indicts Putin (another country that like Israel, did not sign on to the treaty, but what about your jurisdictional concerns Biden!) and then say is bad when it indicts Netenyahu.

This sort of thing inevitably heightens the contradictions between international law and the "Rules Based International Order" which is the term the US uses to describe it's imperial control over the planet and enforcing whatever it's current desires are against all other countries with illegal sanctions and coups and bribes.

[Kaelik]

Follow up, Biden and Blinken have given their official responses.

Biden believes it is outrageous and shameful that the ICC would issue arrest warrants against an Israeli, as all Israelis are by their nature as white people not capable of committing crimes, and that he will stand with genocide.

Blinken says the US "fundamentally rejects" the decision to issue warrants, and they said BEFORE this ruling that the ICC has no jurisdiction for (reason that directly contradicts what they said when the ICC issued a warrant for Putin's arrest) and also, hey, doesn't the very fact that the ICC issued an arrest warrant against an Israeli kind of strongly imply that the entire ICC is corrupt and must be destroyed? Maybe? Just Possibly? Just Asking Questions? This Is A Query And Definitinly Not The US Government Issuing A Threat.

President Biden slammed the International Criminal Court’s decision on Monday to seek to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials, calling the applications “outrageous.”

“Let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas,” Biden said in a statement. “We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken also said in a statement Monday that the United States “fundamentally rejects” the ICC prosecutor’s decision to seek the arrest warrant against “senior Israeli officials, together with warrants for Hamas terrorists,” calling the equivalence “shameful.”

“The United States has been clear since well before the current conflict that ICC has no jurisdiction over this matter,” Blinken said. The United States and Israel are not signatories to the ICC and do not come under its jurisdiction.

Blinken also criticized the procedure leading to Prosecutor Karim Khan’s decision as raising some “deeply troubling process questions” that “call into question the legitimacy and credibility of this investigation,” adding that the decision would do little to help “ongoing efforts to reach a cease-fire agreement.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... NOG762W6P4