Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago
A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail. Israeli officials dismissed it as aspirational and ignored specific warnings.
Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.
The approximately 40-page document, which the Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.
Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened on Oct. 7.
The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.
The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’s capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.
Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials in the Israeli military’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the border with Gaza, said that Hamas’s intentions were unclear.
“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment reviewed by The Times.
Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.
But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.
“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”
“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”
Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.
Instead, the Israeli military was unprepared as terrorists streamed out of the Gaza Strip. It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.
Israeli security officials have already acknowledged that they failed to protect the country, and the government is expected to assemble a commission to study the events leading up to the attacks. The Jericho Wall document lays bare a yearslong cascade of missteps that culminated in what officials now regard as the worst Israeli intelligence failure since the surprise attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.
Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary.
The Israeli military and the Israeli Security Agency, which is in charge of counterterrorism in Gaza, declined to comment.
A blueprint reviewed by The Times laid out the attack in detail.
Officials would not say how they obtained the Jericho Wall document, but it was among several versions of attack plans collected over the years. A 2016 Defense Ministry memorandum viewed by The Times, for example, says, “Hamas intends to move the next confrontation into Israeli territory.”
Such an attack would most likely involve hostage-taking and “occupying an Israeli community (and perhaps even a number of communities),” the memo reads.
The Jericho Wall document, named for the ancient fortifications in the modern-day West Bank, was even more explicit. It detailed rocket attacks to distract Israeli soldiers and send them hurrying into bunkers, and drones to disable the elaborate security measures along the border fence separating Israel and Gaza.
Hamas fighters would then break through 60 points in the wall, storming across the border into Israel. The document begins with a quote from the Quran: “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”
The same phrase has been widely used by Hamas in its videos and statements since Oct. 7.
One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was to overrun the Israeli military base in Re’im, which is home to the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases that fell under the division’s command were also listed.
Hamas carried out that objective on Oct. 7, rampaging through Re’im and overrunning parts of the base.
The audacity of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All militaries write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials assessed that, even if Hamas invaded, it might muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds who ultimately attacked.
Israel had also misread Hamas’s actions. The group had negotiated for permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not looking for a war.
But Hamas had been drafting attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had gotten hold of previous iterations of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.
In September 2016, the defense minister’s office compiled a top-secret memorandum based on a much earlier iteration of a Hamas attack plan. The memorandum, which was signed by the defense minister at the time, Avigdor Lieberman, said that an invasion and hostage-taking would “lead to severe damage to the consciousness and morale of the citizens of Israel.”
The memo, which was viewed by The Times, said that Hamas had purchased sophisticated weapons, GPS jammers and drones. It also said that Hamas had increased its fighting force to 27,000 people — having added 6,000 to its ranks in a two-year period. Hamas had hoped to reach 40,000 by 2020, the memo determined.
Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.
Hamas had “decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope,” analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division.
But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet.
On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.
The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times.
The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.
The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.
“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.
The back-and-forth continued, with some colleagues supporting the analyst’s original conclusion. Soon, she invoked the lessons of the 1973 war, in which Syrian and Egyptian armies overran Israeli defenses. Israeli forces regrouped and repelled the invasion, but the intelligence failure has long served as a lesson for Israeli security officials.
“We already underwent a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front in connection with a scenario that seemed imaginary, and history may repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote to her colleagues.
While ominous, none of the emails predicted that war was imminent. Nor did the analyst challenge the conventional wisdom among Israeli intelligence officials that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel. But she correctly assessed that Hamas’s capabilities had drastically improved. The gap between the possible and the aspirational had narrowed significantly.
The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when the American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group Al Qaeda was preparing an assault. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were largely a failure of analysis and imagination, a government commission concluded.
“The Israeli intelligence failure on Oct. 7 is sounding more and more like our 9/11,” said Ted Singer, a recently retired senior C.I.A. official who worked extensively in the Middle East. “The failure will be a gap in analysis to paint a convincing picture to military and political leadership that Hamas had the intention to launch the attack when it did.”
Abombshell new investigation from The Intercept reveals that former U.S. national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was responsible for even more civilian deaths during the U.S. war in Cambodia than was previously known. The revelations add to a violent résumé that ranges from Latin America to Southeast Asia, where Kissinger presided over brutal U.S. military interventions to put down communist revolt and to develop U.S. influence around the world. While survivors and family members of these deadly campaigns continue to grieve, Kissinger celebrates his 100th birthday this week. “This adds to the list of killings and crimes that Henry Kissinger should, even at this very late date in his life, be asked to answer for,” says The Intercept’s Nick Turse, author of the new investigation, “Kissinger’s Killing Fields.” We also speak with Yale University’s Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman.
Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement.
The notorious war criminal was 100.
Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose four-year-old McVeigh killed.
McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century.
The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.
“The Cubans say there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong,” Grandin told Rolling Stone not long before Kissinger died. “There is no doubt he’ll be hailed as a geopolitical grand strategist, even though he bungled most crises, leading to escalation. He’ll get credit for opening China, but that was De Gaulle’s original idea and initiative. He’ll be praised for detente, and that was a success, but he undermined his own legacy by aligning with the neocons. And of course, he’ll get off scot free from Watergate, even though his obsession with Daniel Ellsberg really drove the crime.
No infamy will find Kissinger on a day like today. Instead, in a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and — shamefully, since Kissinger had reporters like CBS’ Marvin Kalb and The New York Times‘ Hendrick Smith wiretapped — newsrooms. Kissinger, a refugee from the Nazis who became a pedigreed member of the “Eastern Establishment” Nixon hated, was a practitioner of American greatness, and so the press lionized him as the cold-blooded genius who restored America’s prestige from the agony of Vietnam.
Not once in the half-century that followed Kissinger’s departure from power did the millions the United States killed matter for his reputation, except to confirm a ruthlessness that pundits occasionally find thrilling. America, like every empire, champions its state murderers. The only time I was ever in the same room as Henry Kissinger was at a 2015 national security conference at West Point. He was surrounded by fawning Army officers and ex-officials basking in the presence of a statesman.
Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter who was the most prominent exception to the fawning coverage of Kissinger, watched journalistic deference take shape as soon as Kissinger entered the White House in 1969. “His social comings and goings could make or break a Washington party,” Hersh wrote in his biography The Price of Power. Reporters like the Times’ James Reston were eager participants in what Hersh called “an implicit shakedown scheme” — that is, access journalism — “in which reporters who got inside information in turn protected Kissinger by not divulging either the full consequences of his acts or his own connection to them.” Kissinger’s approach to the press was his approach to Nixon: sniveling obsequiousness. (Although Kissinger could vent frustration on reporters that he never could on his boss.) Hersh quotes H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, remarking that Kissinger was the “hawk of hawks” inside the White House, but “touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove.”
Reviewing one of Kissinger’s litany of books, Hillary Clinton in 2014 said Kissinger, “a friend” whose counsel she relied upon as secretary of state, possessed “a conviction that we, and President Obama, share: a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order.” Kissinger told USA Today within days that Clinton, presumed then to be a president-in-waiting, “ran the State Department in the most effective way that I’ve ever seen.” The same story noticed a photograph autographed by Obama thanking Kissinger for his “continued leadership.”
It’s always valuable to hear the reverent tones with which American elites speak of their monsters. When the Kissingers of the world pass, their humanity, their purpose, their sacrifices are foremost in the minds of the respectable. American elites recoiled in disgust when Iranians in great numbers took to the streets to honor one of their monsters, Qassem Soleimani, after a U.S. drone strike executed the Iranian external security chief in January 2020. Soleimani, whom the United States declared to be a terrorist and killed as such, killed far more people than Timothy McVeigh. But even if we attribute to him all the deaths in the Syrian Civil War, never in Soleimani’s wildest dreams could he kill as many people as Henry Kissinger. Nor did Soleimani get to date Jill St. John, who played Bond girl Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever.
KISSINGER’S ASCENT OCCURRED THROUGH AN OBSCENITY THAT TIME CANNOT DIMINISH.
In 1968, Lyndon Johnson agreed to peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese in tacit recognition of the nightmare he, building on the works of his two immediate predecessors, brought to life in Vietnam. Kissinger, an influential Cold War defense intellectual at Harvard, had access to members of the diplomatic delegation to the Paris talks. He used it to feed information from the negotiations to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign — a campaign whose defeated GOP rival, Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger advised — and despite Kissinger’s closer political ties to the coterie around Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s Democratic rival.
Nixon ran for president claiming to have a secret plan to end the war. His advisers told Hersh they were deeply afraid that Johnson and Hanoi would reach an accord before the election. It would save lives in Vietnam, American and Vietnamese, but it would undermine Nixon’s hopes of exploiting the explosion in domestic antiwar sentiment. Nixon gratefully took what Kissinger gave him to make the U.S.’ proxy regime in Saigon, whose regime peace would destabilize, more intransigent. No agreement was reached until 1973, and the war ended in American humiliation with Hanoi’s 1975 victory.
“It took some balls to give us those tips,” Richard Allen, a foreign policy researcher on the Nixon campaign, later reflected to Hersh. After all, it was “a pretty dangerous thing for [Kissinger] to be screwing around with the national security.”
Every single person who died in Vietnam between autumn 1968 and the Fall of Saigon — and all who died in Laos and Cambodia, where Nixon and Kissinger secretly expanded the war within months of taking office, as well as all who died in the aftermath, like the Cambodian genocide their destabilization set into motion — died because of Henry Kissinger. We will never know what might have been, the question Kissinger’s apologists, and those in the U.S. foreign policy elite who imagine themselves standing in Kissinger’s shoes, insist upon when explaining away his crimes. We can only know what actually happened. What actually happened was that Kissinger materially sabotaged the only chance for an end to the war in 1968 as a hedged bet to ensure he would achieve power in Nixon’s administration or Humphrey’s. A true tally will probably never be known of everyone who died so Kissinger could be national security adviser.
Once in the White House, Nixon and Kissinger found themselves without leverage to produce a peace accord with Hanoi. In the hopes of manufacturing one, they came up with the “Madman Theory,” the idea that North Vietnam would negotiate peace after they came to believe Nixon was adventurous and bloodthirsty enough to risk anything. In February 1969, weeks after taking office, and lasting through April 1970, U.S. warplanes secretly dropped 110,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia. By the summer of 1969, according to a colonel on the Joint Staff, Kissinger — who had no constitutional role in the military chain of command — was personally selecting bombing targets. “Not only was Henry carefully screening the raids, he was reading the raw intelligence,” Col. Ray B. Sitton told Hersh for The Price of Power. A second phase of bombing continued until August 1973, five months after the final U.S. combat troops withdrew from Vietnam. By then, U.S. bombs had killed an estimated 100,000 people out of a population of only 7,000,000. The final phase of the bombing, which occurred after the Paris Peace Accords mandated U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, was its most intense, an act of cruel vengeance from a thwarted superpower.
Cambodia, like Laos before it, was a formally neutral country, meaning that bombing it was an illegal aggression under the United Nations Charter. But beyond the control of Prince Sihanouk, the North Vietnamese used Cambodian territory for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a weapons pipeline not unlike the one America is currently operating for Ukraine. In April 1970, following a coup by American client Col. Lon Nol that overthrew Sihanouk, Nixon ordered U.S. troops in Vietnam to invade Cambodia outright. In the air or on the ground, they were unable to destroy the trail, only human beings. Those who survived reacted. “Sometimes the bombs fell and hit the little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge,” a former Khmer Rouge cadre told historian Ben Kiernan, founder of Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program.
Nixon and Kissinger’s failure in Cambodia prompted in 1971 the U.S.-South Vietnamese invasion of Laos, another failure. Kissinger later blamed defeat on the U.S.’ clients, rather than, say, people like himself. “In retrospect, I have come to doubt whether the South Vietnamese ever really understood what we were trying to accomplish,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs.
At the time, the secret bombing of Cambodia was a startling offense that prompted substantial political backlash when it became public. One of the articles of impeachment against Nixon prepared by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 held that bombing Cambodia was a constitutional usurpation of Congress’ war powers. But on July 30, the committee ended up rejecting the article, 26 votes to 12, and it never became part of the coalescing impeachment effort that stopped with Nixon’s resignation.
Forty years later, and likely as a consequence, U.S. presidents routinely bomb countries the U.S. is not at war with. They provide the barest minimum of disclosure that the bombs have fallen, and often not even that. When the U.S.’ declared wars fail, as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, their architects and stewards blame the client militaries and governments they propped up. They cover their troop withdrawals with futile bombing campaigns that kill people so American statesmen can save face. Whether he realized it or not, when President Biden in July 2021 blamed the Afghans for losing the Afghanistan war — “the Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight” was a typical line — he was reaching for Nixon and Kissinger’s template.
KISSINGER PLAYED A ROLE IN THE DEATHS OF SO MANY DIFFERENT PEOPLES that treating each with due consideration requires writing a book. Here is one example among many of the sort of carnage Kissinger inflicted indirectly rather than by edict. In 1971, the Pakistani government waged a campaign of genocide to suppress the independence movement in what would become Bangladesh. Pakistan’s Yahya Khan, an architect of the genocide, was valuable to Nixon’s ambitions of restoring diplomatic relations with China. So the U.S. let Khan’s forces rape and murder at least 300,000 people — and perhaps three million. “We can’t allow a friend of ours and China’s to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of India’s,” Nixon quoted Kissinger shrugging.
That perspective typified Kissinger. The Cold War was a geopolitical balance among two great powers. The purpose of Cold War statecraft was to maximize American freedom of action to inflict Washington’s will on the world — a zero-sum contest that meant restricting the ability of the Soviet Union to inflict Moscow’s — without the destabilization, or outright armageddon, that would result from pursuing a final defeat of the Soviets. That last part explains much right-wing hostility toward Kissinger. Kissinger represented anticommunism without ideological zeal. He was an energetic, even relentless practitioner of the Cold War, the theater of anticommunist conflict. But like George Kennan before him, Kissinger thought viewing the Cold War in ideological terms missed the point. The point was American geopolitical dominance, something measured in impunity and achieved by any means necessary. That permitted Nixon and Kissinger the creativity to reopen China, something Nixon would have demagogued anyone else for attempting.
The 1972 visit by United States President Richard Nixon to the People's Republic of China was an important strategic and diplomatic overture that marked the culmination of the Nixon administration's resumption of harmonious relations between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China after years of diplomatic isolation.
Reopening China was by far the greatest achievement of Nixon’s foreign policy. It was the rare geopolitical initiative where Kissinger was a mere facilitator. Sy Hersh, in The Price of Power, calls Nixon “the grand theoretician” of rapprochement with Beijing, with Kissinger Nixon’s “occasional operative.” Kissinger’s dramatic, secret July 1971 trip to Beijing in advance of Nixon’s visit probably renders that description parsimonious. But, writes Hersh, “there is no evidence that Kissinger seriously considered the question of an American-Chinese rapprochement before his appointment as Nixon’s national security adviser.” Once it happened, Kissinger became an overnight celebrity, the sort of person destined to be shrouded in myth and apology.
Kissinger might not have been motivated by hatred of communism. But he was a reactionary who empowered and enabled the sort of reactionaries for whom anticommunism was a respectable channel for America’s racist and exploitative socio-economic traditions. His chief aide on the National Security Council was a rabid anti communist militarist, Army Col. Alexander Haig, a future secretary of state for Ronald Reagan. When Kissinger came under attack from neoconservatives and others on the right who couldn’t tolerate detente with the Soviets and rapprochement with the Chinese, neither he nor they recognized that both of them were driven by the Cold War forces that Kissinger stoked when convenient.
Most important of all the reactionaries was Nixon, without whom Kissinger would have lacked power, and from whom Kissinger would withstand any indignity.
Nixon was one of the original Cold War demagogues, the men who never hesitated to identify communism with Black people and the “Eastern Establishment” liberals who postured as allies. His escalation in Vietnam, along with the secret bombing in Cambodia he revealed in a televised address, prompted a resurgence of the antiwar movement. Nixon exploited the mass protests by contrasting them with the “silent majority” of loyal Americans. Instead of ending the war, as he had campaigned on doing, and silencing or co-opting the antiwar movement in the process, Nixon inflamed a culture war to distract from it. It was an echo of his infamous “Southern Strategy” to harness for the Republican Party the electoral benefits of white backlash to the civil rights movement.
The 1972 visit by United States President Richard Nixon to the People's Republic of China
Nixon was not subtle about who he meant by the Eastern Establishment. When the media seized upon the U.S. massacre at My Lai, Nixon remarked, “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.” Nixon’s White House counsel, John Erlichman, recalled Nixon talking about “Jewish traitors” in front of Kissinger, including “Jews at Harvard.” Kissinger would assure the boss he was one of the good ones. “Well, Mr. President,” Erlichman quoted him responding, “there are Jews and Jews.”
Kissinger maintained his standing in part by savaging the Eastern Establishment from which he emerged. It was not entirely cynical. Kissinger shared with Nixon a contempt for the “defeatism” and “pessimism” of those who flinched at the unsavory Vietnam War they once supported. He rationalized his purges of the National Security Council bureaucracy and his marginalization of the State Department — measures that made him indispensable to foreign policy, and to Nixon — as protecting American power from those who lacked the confidence to wield it. It is revealing that among those who make U.S. foreign policy, Kissinger’s perspective is not considered ideological.
Kissinger’s consolidation of bureaucratic control was punitive and paranoid. He used the fear of internal leaks to get the FBI to wiretap his staff and the journalists he suspected of receiving their information. Yet the Eastern Establishmentarians around Kissinger, on his staff or in the press, followed him like a puppy seeking an ear scratch. His coldblooded American exceptionalism was the perfect tone for speaking to a shaken ruling class. Anthony Lake, who would go on to become national security adviser to Bill Clinton, finally quit in May 1970, alongside his colleague Roger Morris. Their breaking points were the Vietnam escalation, Nixon’s alcoholism, and the surreptitious White House wiretaps that Nixon also pursued to enforce loyalty. But Lake and Morris opted not to go public. “I consider the failure to do so to be the biggest failure of my life,” Morris told Hersh for The Price of Power. “We didn’t do so on the single calculation that it would destroy Henry.” Weeks later, Kissinger, via Haig, had the FBI wiretap Lake.
IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, KISSINGER DESTROYED.
But in Chile, he helped build a template for the world in which we currently live.
On September 4, 1970, Chileans elected the democratic socialist Salvador Allende president. Allende’s program was more than redistributionist. It demanded reparation from the U.S. for exploiting it. Chile is rich in copper, and by the mid-1960s, 80 percent of its copper production was controlled by American corporations, particularly the firms Anaconda Copper and Kennecott. When Allende nationalized mining assets held by the two companies, Allende informed them he would deduct estimated “excess profit” from a compensatory package he was willing to pay the firms. It was this sort of unacceptable policy that prompted Kissinger to remark, during an intelligence meeting about two months before Allende’s election, “I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”
Kissinger meant that there must never be an example of a country in America’s sphere of influence delivering socialism through the ballot. “Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro,” Kissinger staffer Morris told Hersh. “Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America.”
Kissinger and the CIA had decided to overthrow Allende just days after Allende’s election. Upon learning what was in motion, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago, Edward Korry, who was second to none in opposing Allende, cabled Kissinger that “to actively encourage a coup could lead us to a Bay of Pigs failure.” An “apoplectic Kissinger” told Korry to stay out of the way, according to Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of The CIA. When the CIA failed at what Korry termed a Rube Goldberg gambit to get the Chilean Congress to stop Allende from taking office — that’s right, the CIA tried a January 6 in Chile — Haig urged his boss to purge “the key left-wing dominated slots” in the agency.
Korry was wrong in the end. Kissinger’s policy of overthrowing Allende — “Why not support extremists?” he spitballed in a December 1970 White House meeting with the CIA’s covert-operations chief, Tom Karamessines — paid off on September 11, 1973, when a military junta took power, prompting Allende’s suicide. He would be among the first of 3,200 Chileans to die violently under the 17-year regime of Augusto Pinochet and his Caravana de la Muerte, to say nothing of the tens of thousands tortured and imprisoned. “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes,” Kissinger told Nixon in a telephone conversation days after the coup. The same week he denied at his Senate confirmation hearings that the U.S. played any role in it.
The coup was only the beginning. Within two years, Pinochet’s regime invited Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger, and other economists from the University of Chicago to advise them. Chile pioneered the implementation of their agenda: severe government budgetary austerity; relentless assaults on organized labor; privatization of state assets, including health care and public pensions; layoffs of government employees; abolition of wages and price controls; and deregulation of capital markets. “Multinationals were not only granted the right to repatriate 100 percent of their profits but given guaranteed exchange rates to help them do so,” Grandin writes in his book Empire’s Workshop. European and American bankers flocked to Chile before its 1982 economic collapse. The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank loaned Pinochet $3.1 billion between 1976 and 1986. As Corey Robin has documented, Friedrich von Hayek’s neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society held a 1981 meeting in the very city where the junta plotted the replacement of democratic socialism with a harbinger of today’s global economic order.
Pinochet’s torture chambers were the maternity ward of neoliberalism, a baby delivered bloody and screaming by Henry Kissinger. This was the “just and liberal world order” Hillary Clinton considered Kissinger’s life work.
He was no less foundational in pushing the frontiers of where American military power could operate. It turned out the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which lasted years, represented a template. When Nixon in 1970 revealed the secret bombings, it was a step too far even for Thomas Schelling, one of the Pentagon’s favorite defense academics, who called them “sickening.” As Grandin writes in Kissinger’s Shadow, the Cambridge-to-Washington set was not prepared in 1970 to accept that the U.S. had the right to destroy an enemy “safe haven” in a country it was not at war with and to do it all in secret, thereby shielding a war from basic public scrutiny. After 9/11, those assertions became accepted, foundational pillars of a War on Terror permitting four presidents to bomb, for 20 years, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians, and others.
Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago in June 1976. It was a time of rising U.S. congressional anger at Pinochet’s reign of terror. Kissinger informed the general that he was obliged to make an anodyne criticism of Pinochet to forestall adverse legislation. “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world,” Kissinger said, according to a declassified cable, “and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.” Three months later, U.S. diplomats warned Kissinger about Operation Condor, an international campaign of right-wing assassinations pursued by the anticommunist regimes of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Kissinger “has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter,” according to a September 16, 1976 cable. Five days later, a car bomb emplaced by Pinochet’s agents detonated along Washington D.C.’s Embassy Row, killing Orlando Letelier, Allende’s foreign minister, and his American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt.
In 1999, Pinochet was arrested in London through an effort by Baltazar Garzon, a Spanish judge investigating Operation Condor. Kissinger urged the British not to extradite the general. “I would be very happy if Pinochet was allowed home,” he told an interviewer. “This episode has gone on long enough and all my sympathies are with him.” Two years later, the administration of George W. Bush responded contemptuously to the Chilean Supreme Court’s efforts to compel Kissinger to testify. “It is unjust and ridiculous that a distinguished servant of this country should be harassed by foreign courts in this way,” an official told the Daily Telegraph. The paper noted that Kissinger was an “informal adviser” to Bush, as he was to many presidents.
Bush’s declaration of protection for Kissinger, coupled with his rejection of the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court, extinguished a glimmer of hope that Kissinger would someday join Pinochet under arrest. It was always a fantasy. The international architecture that the U.S. and its allies established after World War II, shorthanded today as the “rules-based international order,” somehow never gets around to applying the same pressure on a hegemonic United States as it applies to U.S.-hostile or defiant powers. It reflects the organizing principle of American exceptionalism: America acts; it is not acted upon. Henry Kissinger was a supreme architect of the rules-based international order.
In that regard, Kissinger was singular but was by no means unique. Kissinger built upon foundations constructed by Henry Morgenthau, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Paul Nitze, the Dulles brothers, the Bundy brothers, JFK — you could go back to Albert Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt if you wanted; or James Monroe; or, depending on how fundamental you think empire is to America, 1619. He and Nixon chose to escalate in Vietnam and pursue the destruction of Cambodia. But the Pentagon Papers showed that the Vietnam War was the result of compounding decisions made in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. The Vietnamese guerilla and justice minister Truong Nhu Tang writes in his Viet Cong Memoir that Kissinger, whose intellect he praises, “inherited a conceptual framework from his American and French predecessors … that led him to disaster.”
Kissinger and Nixon turned that into Watergate — as Grandin pointed out earlier in this story, Watergate began with a demand for vengeance on Daniel Ellsberg, the anti-Kissinger, for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Watergate was a grim demonstration, for neither the first nor the last time, that the crimes America commits abroad have a dialectical relationship with the crimes that America commits at home. Infamy has as many fathers as victory.
That, ultimately, is why Kissinger died a celebrity, with the wealth necessary to get taken in by Theranos. It is why Roger Morris and Anthony Lake opted against telling the country that the commander-in-chief was an alcoholic who was secretly surveilling his real and imagined critics. Whatever Kissinger’s origins, whatever rants about Jewboys he had to endure, Kissinger was an exemplar of the self-confident geopolitical potency that America’s elites, whatever they might personally think of Henry Kissinger, want America to make the world respect. When the Roger Morrises and Anthony Lakes and Hillary Clintons see Henry Kissinger, they see, despite what they will rotely and euphemistically acknowledge as his flaws, themselves as they wish to be.
Kissinger lived for over half a century in the world he had made. He was its hubris. He could see that the Iraq war would be a disaster, but he went along with it anyway, declaring: “the case for removing Iraq’s capacity of mass destruction is extremely strong.” Kissinger’s calculation, expressed in the noblest possible way, is that acceptance of an impending disaster is the price of influencing and hence mitigating it. His accommodation to the inevitability of political decisions he thought were folly hearkened back to his 1968 embrace of Nixon. What were the lives of Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Iraqis compared to Kissinger’s opportunity to help shape history?
Whatever bitterness Kissinger, in his final days, experienced over the erosion of his enterprise is little comfort to his millions of victims. America denied them the closure Kathleen Treanor experienced when America, declaring justice, ended Timothy McVeigh
(Spencer Ackerman (born June 1, 1980) is an American journalist and writer. Focusing primarily on national security, he began his career at The New Republic in 2002 before writing for Wired, The Guardian and The Daily Beast.
He won a 2012 National Magazine Award for reporting on biased FBI training materials and shared in a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 2013 global surveillance disclosures. His book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump was named a best nonfiction book of 2021 by The New York Times, The Washington Post and Foreign Policy.)
We are expecting another massive march this weekend to demand a permanent ceasefire in Gaza where we will be on the streets of London from across Britain to make our voices heard.
Despite the temporary ‘pause’ in fighting and the exchange of hostages and prisoners, we know that this is only a brief and partial respite for the people of Gaza, who face a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. Over 14500 are dead, including up to 6000 children, half the buildings in the north of Gaza have been badly damaged or destroyed, and hospitals and schools have been targets of Israeli bombardment. Without a permanent ceasefire the truce announced today could prove to be little more than a stay of execution of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children. We believe it is therefore vital to keep marching and to raise our voices in solidarity with the Palestinians.
Our marches are repeatedly smeared as hate marches by right wing media and politicians. The reality is the opposite – they are mass peaceful protests attended by all races and religions, including many Jewish people. We march on clear anti racist foundations believing that the struggles against all forms of racism including antisemitism Islamophobia and Israel’s system of apartheid are indivisible. You are not an antiracist unless you oppose all of them in word and deed. We also reject all attempts to conflate antisemitism with legitimate advocacy for Palestinian rights and criticism of the actions of the Israeli State. In this regard we reject all attempts to suggest that the chanting of the slogan ‘From the river to the sea Palestine will be free’ is anti semitic or an expression of intent to harm Jewish Israelis or Jewish people more generally. The slogan expresses the legitimacy of the Palestinian people’s struggle against apartheid and for rights and freedom.
Stop the Gaza war: London March
We ask that all attending our marches respect these clear anti-racist principles, including in any signs or placards they choose to bring to the march.
We expect this march to be peaceful and, as in previous weeks, mainly without incident. We regret very much that the police and some of the media tend to highlight a very few incidents, and we feel it is intrusive for the police to leaflet the march. But we do ask that everyone avoids any actions that might leave you or others around you open to arrest. Please also follow the instructions of our stewards if there are any incidents or problems.
We put a huge amount of effort into stewarding and safeguarding our marches. We know that our supporters will do everything they can to cooperate and work together and make this another great protest when we stand up for the rights of the Palestinians.
When the march is over please disperse quickly and in groups to avoid any problems from the police or anyone else. We ask everyone to stay together, to organise stewards for your coach or group, to avoid any provocations, and to ensure that we have another protest which demonstrates to the world our strength and determination in solidarity with Palestine.
Statement on behalf of: Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Stop the War Coalition, Muslim Association of Britain, Palestinian Forum in Britain and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
அலெக்சின் இறுதிப் பயணம்:25-year-old Nagarasa Alex describes the torture he suffered at the hands of Vaddukottai police. Alex is reported to have died the same day.
இலங்கை-ஈழம் யாழ்ப்பாணம் வட்டுக்கோட்டை சித்தங்கேணி எனும் சிற்றூரைச் சேர்ந்தவர், 26 வயதுடைய அலெக்ஸ் என்ற தமிழ் இளைஞர்.இவர் உள்ளூரில் நடைபெற்ற ஒரு சிறு குற்றச் செயல் சம்பந்தமாக சந்தேகத்தின் நிமித்தம் பொலிசாரால் கைது செய்யப்பட்டு பொலிஸ் நிலையத்தில் ‘’விசாரணைக்கு’’ உட்படுத்தப்பட்டார். விசாரணையில் அலெக்ஸ் இக்குற்றச் சாட்டை தொடர்ந்து மறுத்து வந்தார்.
இவரை 19-11-2023 ஞாயிறு அன்று பிரேத பரிசோதனைக்காக யாழ் மருத்துவ மனையில் ஒப்படைத்த பொலிசார், ‘’அலெக்ஸ் பொலிஸ் நிலையத்தில் இருந்து மருத்துவ மனைக்கு எடுத்து வரும் வேளையில், ’இடை வழியில் இறைபதம் அடைந்தார்’ என அதிகார பூர்வ அறிக்கை சமர்ப்பித்துள்ளனர்.
பிரேத பரிசோதனை அறிக்கை ’அலெக்சின் மரணம் இயற்கை மரணம் அல்ல எனவும் அவரின் பின் மைய உடற் பகுதியின் மேலும் கீழும் படுகாயப்பட்டதற்கான அடையாளங்கள் பல காணப்பட்டன’ எனக் கண்டறிந்துள்ளது.
Trunk எனும் மருத்துவப் பதம் கருதும் உடற் பாகங்கள்
அலெக்ஸ் பலியான அன்று, தான் எவ்வாறு விசாரிக்கப்பட்டேன், எவ்வாறு சித்திரவதை செய்யப்பட்டேன், எவ்வாறு துன்புறுத்தவும் மிரட்டவும் பட்டேன் என தெளிவாகவும்,விரிவாகவும் கூறியுள்ளார். (ஆண் பெண் அடங்கிய இருவரது கேள்விக்கு அலெக்ஸ் பதிலளிக்கின்றார், சில கேள்விகள் வீடியோவில் தெளிவாக இல்லை).
அவர் கூறியதாவது:
‘’ களவு போன சந்தேகத்தில் பொலிஸ் கொண்டு போய் அடிச்சது. கட்டித் தூக்கீற்று அடிச்சவங்கள். துணியால மூஞ்சையைக் கட்டிப் போட்டு தண்ணியை ஊத்தி ஊத்தி அடிச்சவங்கள்.எழுந்திருக்க முடியல்ல....சாப்பாடு இறங்கல்ல..ஒரு கொஞ்சமாத்தான் சாப்பிட வேண்டிக் கிடந்தது.
அப்ப.... துணியக் கட்டி அடிச்சுப்போட்டு விட்டவங்கள்.பேந்து கயிற்றைக் கட்டி ஒரு ரெண்டு முழத்துக்கு மேல தூக்கிப் போட்டு பிறங்கையில் கயித்தக் கட்டி இழுத்துப்போட்டு அடிச்சவங்கள்...பிடிச்சு வச்சு அடிச்சவங்கள்.
கேட்டுக் கேட்டு அடிச்சவங்கள்.நான் இல்லை அண்ணா...... இல்லை அண்ணா......
பேந்து பெற்றோலை வாயில தடவிப் போட்டு அடிச்சவங்கள்...நான் .... மயங்கிப் போனன் அதில.
அடுத்த நாள் தான் சாப்பாடு தந்து, அவையின்ர றூமில கூட்டிக் கொண்டுபோய் வைச்சிருந்து சொன்னவை...சொல்ல வேண்டாம், கேஸ் போட வேண்டாம், ஹியூமன்ஸ் றைற்சில ஒன்றும்.... எண்டெல்லாம் சொன்னவை எனக்கு. சொல்லிப் பிந்தி அடுத்த நாளும் பயப்பிடுத்திவிட்டவை என்ன (என்னை).
(கேள்வி) ஓ..ஓ..என்னைப் பயப்பிடுத்தி விட்டவை. நான் ஒன்றும் பறையல்ல. அவ்வளவுதான்.
சாராயம் தந்தவங்கள் குடிக்க. ஒரு பெக் சாராயம். அவ்வளவு தான்.
ரெண்டு மணித்தியாலங்களுக்கு மேல் கட்டி வைச்சிருந்தவங்கள்.
அவரது மரண வாக்குமூலம் பிரேத பரிசோதனைக் குறிப்பை ஊர்ஜிதம் செய்கின்றது.
அலெக்ஸ் ‘விசாரணையின்’ போது இறந்தாரா, போகிற வழியில் இறைபதம் அடைந்தாரா என்கிற சட்ட வாதத்தில் நமக்கு நம்பிக்கை இல்லை.
அலெக்ஸ் எங்கு இறந்திருந்தாலும் அவர் சித்திரவதையால் இறந்தார். அதற்கு பொலிசாரே பொறுப்பு.
(காகித) சட்டத்தின் ஆட்சியில் சித்திரவதை தடை செய்யப்பட்ட ஒன்று.அதனால் தான் அமெரிக்கா அதை அபுகிரேயிலும், குவாண்டனாமோ பேய்யிலும் செய்தது. அலெக்ஸிற்கு இழைக்கப்பட்ட Waterboarding சித்திரவதை சர்வதேசச் சட்டங்களில் தடை செய்யப்பட்ட விசாரணை முறையாகும்.
ஆனால் இஸ்ரேலின் புண்ணியத்தில் இப்போது சர்வதேச சட்ட நியமம் என்று ஒன்று உலகில் ஒக்ரோபர் 7 (2023) இற்குப் பின்னால் இல்லாதொழிந்துவிட்டது.
பொருளாதார வங்குரோத்து கொள்ளையில் குற்றவாளி என உச்சநீதி மன்றம் தீர்ப்பளித்த குற்றவாளி 'கேக்' ஊட்ட, ஜனாதிபதி கை தட்டி பிறந்த நாள் கொண்டாடுகின்ற ஆட்சி!
IMF அதானி பொருளாதாரத் திட்டத்தை பாசிசக் கரங்கொண்டு அமூலாக்க பொலிசாருக்கு சித்திரவதை சிறந்த கருவியாகும்.
Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is welcomed by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at Bellevue Castle in Berlin, Germany, November 17, 2023. REUTERS/Liesa Johannssen
Erdogan in tense talks in Germany as divisions over Gaza war deepen
Turkey’s president stresses need for ceasefire,
while Germany’s Scholz backs Israel’s right to defend itself.
AJ 17 Nov 2023
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was on a brief and tense visit to Germany amid deep differences between the two NATO allies over the war in Gaza.
Erdogan has called Israel a “terror state” and pointed to its Western allies, including Germany, for supporting the military’s “massacres” in Gaza.
On Friday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz underlined Israel’s right to defend itself.
“Our solidarity with Israel is not up for discussion,” he said at a joint news conference with Erdogan.
“We don’t owe anything to Israel, so we can speak freely,” Erdogan said, referring to Germany’s responsibilities in the Holocaust and how Berlin can influence its relationship with Israel. “If we were in debt, we could not talk so freely. But those who are in debt cannot talk freely,” he said.
The Turkish leader also lashed out at Israel over its relentless air and ground offensive in Gaza, saying that attacks on children and hospitals had no place in the Jewish holy book.
“Shooting hospitals or killing children does not exist in the Torah, you can’t do it,” Erdogan told reporters.
Ismail Thawabta, the director general of the government media office in Gaza, told reporters on Friday that the total number of Palestinians killed since the war broke out on October 7 has exceeded 12,000, including 5,000 children.
Before the visit, the Turkish leader stepped up his condemnation of the Israeli assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, saying it had “unlimited support” from the West.
He had previously called for Israeli leaders to be tried for war crimes at the International Court of Justice in The Hague and repeated his view – and Turkey’s longstanding position – that Hamas is not a “terrorist organisation” but a political party that won the last Palestinian legislative elections held in 2006.
Since October 7, when Hamas fighters stormed southern Israel killing around 1,200 people, and prompting the Israeli government to retaliate with a devastating air and ground assault on Gaza, the Turkish president has hardened his criticism of Israel.
After the Hamas attack, Scholz travelled to Israel to offer Germany’s support.
This month, Germany announced a complete ban of Hamas activities, as well as those of the German branch of Samidoun, known as the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, claiming it “supports and glorifies” groups including Hamas.
“In our country, anti-Semitism is not permitted in any way,” said Scholz at the news conference.
“I would like to emphasise there are five million Muslims living in Germany and they have a place here,” he added.
Erdogan rebuked suggestions that his attacks on Israel had anti-Semitic undertones.
“For us, there should be no discrimination between Jews, Christians and Muslims in the region. I have fought against anti-Semitism. I am a leader who is leading this fight,” he said.
German authorities have prohibited many pro-Palestinian demonstrations in what they said are efforts to prevent public anti-Semitism and curb disorder.
Uncomfortable partners
“We don’t owe anything to Israel, so we can speak freely,” Erdogan said, referring to Germany’s responsibilities in the Holocaust and how Berlin can influence its relationship with Israel. “If we were in debt, we could not talk so freely. But those who are in debt cannot talk freely,” he said.
The two countries have always been, as characterised by Scholz’s spokesman, “uncomfortable partners”.
Berlin has been a loud critic of Erdogan’s clampdown on domestic dissent while recognising that getting regional power Turkey onside was necessary to tackle thorny issues.
Despite their differences, economic cooperation between the two countries has continued, with bilateral trade reaching a record 51.6 billion euros ($56.2bn) in 2022.
Germany is home to the largest Turkish diaspora abroad. A majority of the Turkish community of three million are supporters of Erdogan.
Erdogan’s stance sparked questions in Germany about the wisdom of hosting the Turkish leader at this time, with the opposition conservatives and even the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), a member of Scholz’s coalition, urging the chancellor to scrap the invitation.
While much of the news conference was dominated by the Israel-Hamas conflict, the two leaders also spoke about the Russia-Ukraine grain deal, which Turkey helped broker before Russia withdrew from it.
They were set to attempt to find common ground on a migration pact struck in 2016 between the European Union and Turkey to stem arrivals in Europe.
Erdogan linked continuing discussions on that deal, which some European countries would like to revive and amend, to Turkey’s EU accession process, which was been on ice.
He also hoped to win Scholz’s backing to revive talks on modernising Turkey’s customs union with the EU, and liberalise visas for Turkish citizens ahead of upcoming municipal elections where he hopes to win back the country’s largest cities including its capital Ankara and Istanbul.
Turkey has wanted to buy 40 Eurofighter Typhoon jets, which, according to Turkey’s Ministry of Defence, co-manufacturer Germany has opposed.
We must now start a recovery process from those who have been held responsible by the Supreme Court.
TNA Jaffna District MP M.A. Sumanthiran told Parliament on Wednesday that Rajapaksa brothers had enough money to compensate 22 million people in the country.
Participating in the second reading debate on Budget 2023, MP Sumanthiran said that his party welcomed the Supreme Court determination that ex-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, along with former Finance Ministers Mahinda Rajapaksa and Basil Rajapaksa, successive governors of the Central Bank, Secretary to the Treasury and the monetary board of the Central bank bear responsibility for Sri Lanka’s severe economic crisis and had thereby violated the fundamental rights of the people by mismanaging the economy.
Sumanthiran: Rajapaksas have enough money to compensate 22 million Sri Lankans
PB Jayasundara, former Advisor to the President had been found guilty in a earlier case Vasudeva Nanayakkara Vs KN Choksy. He was found guilty and fined Rs 500,000 at that time by the Supreme Court. He paid the fine. The Supreme Court ruled that he should not be allowed to hold public office thereafter. He undertook not to take any public office by submitting an affidavit to the court. Later there was a change in the post of Chief Justice. That chief justice allowed the withdrawal of the affidavit to enable P.B. Jayasundara to hold public office again. Now the Supreme Court has given another ruling holding P.B. Jayasundara and others responsible for the collapse of the economy. When it comes to compensation, the court has not considered compensation because the petitioners have not asked the court to do so. The court could have given that order.
We must now start a recovery process from those who have been held responsible by the Supreme Court.
Surely the Rajapaksa brothers have enough money to pay compensation to all people in this country. All their money parked outside the country can be brought here for that purpose. The minister of justice has stated that there are people who have parked their monies outside this country. This money should be brought and be used to revive the country’s collapsed economy. These are monies stolen from people. What the Supreme Court should have done was to order them to pay compensation to all the citizens of this country, to bring the money to the Treasury and that could have been used to revive the economy. This is not the end. We must now start a recovery process from those who have been held responsible by the Supreme Court. Every citizen in this country is now entitled to recover the money that had been stolen from them. These monies now abroad must be brought back to revive the collapsed economy,” Sumanthiran said.
MPs voted 293 to 125, majority 168, to reject the SNP’s King’s Speech amendment calling for “all parties to agree to an immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.
Labour leader Keir Starmer hit by major rebellion as parliament votes against ceasefire in Gaza
A total of 56 Labour MPs voted for a ceasefire in Gaza as party leader Keir Starmer was hit by a major rebellion over his position on the war.
Jess Phillips, the shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding, was among 10 frontbenchers who defied the leader’s order not to vote for the SNP amendment to the King’s Speech on Wednesday evening.
Mr Starmer has called for humanitarian pauses in the conflict between Hamas and Israel to allow aid to reach those in need.
Explaining his position, which is in line with that of the government, Mr Starmer said a ceasefire would allow Hamas to regroup and launch further terror attacks on Israel.
Pro-Palestine protest: 'More than 800,000' people march through London
