By Intelligence Editor Husband Kimmel (Adm., U.S.N. Ret.) in Tel Aviv
The Financial Times, a newspaper not known for publishing garbage, had a report today accusing the Netanyahu Regime of ignoring specific actionable intelligence pointing to a Hamas attack before October 7 (a report confirmed by the Israel Broadcasting Corporation):
Those ladies and their hyperactive imaginations, amirite people? We'll never know for sure because lots of them were slaughtered by Hamas on October 7 due to the failure of the Israeli Government to take their eyewitness reporting seriously.
As with most other grievous intelligence failures, the question is why the information was ignored.
Fortunately the FT has the answer:
And who runs that Government and came up with genius strategies like bribing Hamas to weaken their rival, the Palestinian Authority, and thereby frustrate any progress toward a durable peace in the region based on a two-state solution?
He's known by his supporters as Bibi, Melech Yisrael, but you know him as Benjamin Netanyahu, King of Israel.
For decades he has devoted himself to two causes: (1) perpetuating his corrupt rule and (2) making it impossible for Palestinians to ever obtain a state of their own. Until October 7, he was thought to be succeeding on both counts.
The pro-Zionist advocacy group J Street summed up Bibi's effort in this pre-war analysis:
Speaking of prophecy, their concern about an “intensifying cycle of violence” seems to have aged pretty well.
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| Fun game: find the two-state solution! (Courtesy, PBS) |
Prior to October 7, Netanyahu seemed to be well on his way to succeeding in writing the Palestinians out of his crackpot hard right “peace” plan:
Netanyahu has often seemed to revel in using the podium of the General Assembly to lambast Israel’s enemies.....
This year, his map made no reference to the West Bank, Gaza or east Jerusalem, territories Israel captured in the 1967 war that the Palestinians want for their future state. The map appeared to show Israel encompassing all three.
The chamber was largely empty during his address this year,...
Bibi had concocted this absurd plan to bury Palestinian hopes for their own state by dealing directly with various murderous Arab regimes, like Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bone Saw, with the connivance of Mr. Sara's equally corrupt loathsome and incompetent ally, the 91-times indicted former President of the United States.
Our purpose is not just to rubbish Bibi as a corrupt incompetent anti-democratic hatemonger (well, not just), but to offer his grotesque failure to protect his country against Hamas atrocities as an example of a larger historical phenomenon: the inability of white men to comprehend and act upon intelligence that doesn't comport with their preconceived world view.
With the United State and its Allies hours away from being blown to bits by the Empire of Japan from Manila to Pearl Harbor to Singapore to Hong Kong, here's how The New York Times assessed the security situation on December 7, 1941:
In this case, the temporary maintenance of the status quo lasted about three hours after the great and good of Washington read this over their Sunday morning breakfast.
Or, within living memory, during the days when the Republican Party was run by moderates bursting with new ideas and wisely guided by hacks doing business today as our Wonderful Republican Allies wondering what happened to their beloved party, this colossal intelligence failure:
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| Speaking of intelligence failures that cost lives... |
What's clear is that [CIA Director George] Tenet, for months, had been doing everything he could think of to sound the alarm and get Bush focused on Al Qaeda. So had Richard A. Clarke, who handled domestic counterterrorism in the Bush White House, and reported up to Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor. "We agreed that Tenet would ensure that the President's daily briefings would continue to be replete with information on Al Qaeda," Clarke wrote in his memoir. The day after the September 11 attacks, according to Clarke, Bush told him to "see if Saddam is involved" and "look into Iraq." Clarke famously claimed that he tried and failed to get past Rice so his concerns about Al Qaeda would reach Bush. Clarke wanted counterterrorism to be taken seriously as its own issue at the cabinet level; the record shows it was treated with less urgency, as an extension of US policy in the Middle East and South Asia. Clarke's inability to make domestic counterterrorism a policy focus for the White House tends to implicate Rice, but it does not absolve Bush. It's clear that Bush received the same sorts of urgent warnings that Clarke was seeing regularly, from Tenet and the CIA. He just doesn't seem to have responded, as both Clarke and Tenet did, with a sense of alarm.
A few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Bush paid a visit to the counterterrorism center at the CIA. He walked through the corridors, making small talk and shaking hands. "Go get 'em!" someone shouted to Bush, according to a former CIA employee who was there at the time. Bush looked stunned for a moment. Then came his reply: "That's your job."
Yeah, the buck always stops with somebody else. At least Bibi and George W. agree on something.
What can we learn from these debacles, other than the folly of entrusting hollow shameless men like Netanyahu and George W. Bush with responsibility over their lives and deaths of the citizens of their country?
Lesson one: when a white man is determined to do something stupid, it's impossible to persuade them with intelligence.
The second lesson is borrowed from the MeToo movement: When women tell you something bad is happening, believe them.
Because whether it's a case of domestic violence here or Hamas atrocities elsewhere, if you don't believe women, they have a way of ending up dead.
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