“There’s no incentive to investigate if the president and the White House themselves have announced that aid is unconditional,” said Brian Finucane, who worked for a decade in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the State Department advising on arms transfers and the laws of war.
“That means they don’t want to hear inconvenient legal conclusions,” he told The Independent.
Mr Finucane said senior administration officials he had spoken to had been met with a “shrug” by the US intelligence community when they quizzed them about mass civilian casualty incidents caused by Israeli bombing, “because it’s no one’s job in the US intelligence community, apparently, to actually investigate these things.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Investigations into potential Israeli war crimes and violations of international law are being undermined by President Joe Biden’s insistence on providing his close ally with billions of dollars in unconditional military support, several former State Department and Pentagon officials told The Independent.
The former officials say the president’s decades-long and deeply held personal connection to Israel renders US laws and regulations concerning US arms sales essentially toothless.
Charles Blaha, former director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights, which regulates weapons transfers, said investigations into breaches of humanitarian law in the Gaza conflict — if they are taking place at all — are likely not being taken seriously.
On Wednesday, just one day after the killings, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby tersely rejected the notion that the US should reconsider sending weapons to Israel while it is potentially breaching international humanitarian law.
“Civil society and the media can keep pointing out that Israel is violating the law or that its conduct of operations requires certain actions by the US government to cut assistance; but at the end of the day, what’s driving the entire process is the ideological and political perspective of the president,” Sarah Harrison, a former Pentagon attorney in the Office of General Counsel between 2017 and 2021, serving the Secretary of Defense, told The Independent.
However, Mr Kirby, the White House spokesperson, made clear on Wednesday morning that the Biden administration would continue supporting Israel despite the international uproar.
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