By Mike Huckabee
October 12, 2023
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It was the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War --- actually the day after, so it would fall on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath and also Simchat Torah, the day when Jews celebrate reading the Torah. We’d just seen President Biden preside over a prisoner swap in exchange for $6 billion in freed-up money to Iran. (And it doesn’t matter which Iranian “pocket” that money goes into; leftist media need to stop insulting our intelligence trying to split that hair.) This was also after Biden’s 2021 delivery of nearly $400 million to the Palestinian Authority (!!), which experts have been warning would help Hamas and cause them to organize more terrorist attacks. Tensions had reportedly been escalating. Yet Israel was caught off guard, and so, it seems, were we.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday, “Hamas is ISIS.” We would go further to say that in helping Hamas, however indirectly, by telling Iran it was about to be $6 billion richer, we gave aid and comfort to our own (and Israel’s) enemy.
Now, AFTER the worst attack on Israel since the Holocaust, we know that Iran, the #1 state sponsor of terrorism, spent weeks --- months, more likely --- plotting it with Hamas.
On Monday, Biden “put a lid on the day” early and attended a barbeque that night. He must not have been overcome with curiosity about how this huge, well-orchestrated attack could’ve happened without the knowledge of either America or Israel, the countries with arguably the best intelligence agencies in the world. Have we perhaps been spending too much time trying to ferret out those dangerous Trump supporters, maybe at church or bingo? How on earth could the U.S. not have known that Iran was working with Palestinian terrorists on this attack?
According to THE GUARDIAN, “it is a mystery why Israeli intelligence appears to have had no idea it was coming.” They explained that “Israel’s surveillance of Gaza is intense. It monitors activity, communications and daily life via state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, including drones flying over the strip. It also relies on human intelligence via informants, many of whom are blackmailed or otherwise coerced into assisting Israel.” Sadly, that’s the way covert operations work here, too.
“The intelligence failure is monumental,” they went on to report, “and will shake the Israeli public’s faith in their government and army’s ability to protect civilians.” As Eli Maron, a former head of the Israeli navy, said, “All of Israel is asking itself, where is the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces], where are the police, where is the security?”
THE GUARDIAN reports that many people in Gaza just want to live their lives, free from repeated wars and conflicts. “They resent the fears imposed on them and the fear instilled in them by Hamas rulers.” And, “the apparent lack of knowledge of Hamas’ plot will likely be seen as a prime culprit in the chain of events that led to the deadliest attack against Israelis in decades...The ferocious attack, which likely took months of planning and involved coordination among multiple militia groups, appeared to have gone under Israel’s intelligence radar.”
Retired Israeli Gen. Amir Avivi said that without a foothold in Gaza, Israeli security forces have relied on technological means to gather intelligence, and Gaza militants have found ways to evade these. “They’ve gone back to the Stone Age,” he said.
(Scary sidenote: while our intelligence agencies have been laser-focused on the “threat” of Trump supporters, concerned parents and traditional Catholics, they’ve assured us we have little to worry about from foreign terrorists because there are now “electronic fences,” social media surveillance and other high tech security, just like what Israel relied on in Gaza.)
Avivi also said that Israeli security services were wrong about Hamas’ intentions: “Israel’s security establishment has in recent years increasingly seen Hamas as an actor interested in governing, seeking to develop Gaza’s economy and improving the standard of living for Gaza’s 2.3 million people.” He and others say the truth is that Hamas, which calls for Israel’s destruction, “still sees that aim as its priority.” And now we’ve seen which one of those views turned out to be right. They’re really just dirty terrorists.
https://www.theguardian.com/
But that still doesn’t explain how such a devastating, multifaceted attack could have been planned without the knowledge of Israeli and American intelligence.
“...The weekend’s assault, which caught Israel off guard on a major Jewish holiday, plunges [their intelligence] reputation into doubt and raises questions about the country’s readiness in the face of a weaker but determined foe,” reported the Associated Press. “This is a major failure,” said Yaakov Amidror, former national security adviser to Netanyahu. “This operation actually proves that the [intelligence] abilities in Gaza were no good.”
Amidror had no explanation, either, saying lessons must be learned “when the dust settles.”
Chief military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the army owes an explanation, but for now, “First we fight, then we investigate.”
…
As reported in THE HILL, U.S. intelligence officials refused to call this an intelligence failure.
On Sunday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken sidestepped the question. “We will have plenty --- we will have plenty of time to --- the Israelis will have plenty of time to look into that,” he stammered.
He told FOX NEWS SUNDAY host Shannon Bream that “there will be a time and place to look back on exactly how this happened, who knew what when, but that moment is not now when we’re still in the throes of the attack, as your reporting just showed this is still ongoing.”
Wrong, Mr. Secretary of State. This IS the time and place. Blinken is stalling for time until he and his people can devise the story they want us to swallow, and Americans are sick of that. It doesn’t make sense that our government wouldn’t have been able to foresee anything about this.
(Maybe our patience is just running thin and our trust is gone after January 6, now that we know our FBI had quite a bit of information on, and involvement with, activities leading up to Trump’s rally. Benghazi comes to mind as well. They’ve lied to us so much that their old playbook really doesn’t work any longer.)
As for the Iranians, they’ve certainly had their own spies in place. Recall the story we ran last week from Matt Taibbi in TABLET, about Biden’s chief envoy to Iran Robert Malley being involved in a high-level Iranian spy ring busted in DC. Sean Hannity addressed this on Monday with guests former CIA station chief Dan Hoffman and Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, who called this “an absolute intelligence failure.”
Waltz expressed concern that “actually, we WERE picking things up, and then you’ve got so many Iran sympathizers in the Biden administration that they were simply looking away.”
Ah, at last, somebody said it!
Waltz continued: “Not only do you have Robert Malley, who was the chief negotiator for the Iran deal under Biden and Obama, essentially running a spy ring, you have the chief of staff in the Pentagon, of our Special Operations Office...read on to all kinds of departmental programs; she’s still on the job. She still has access to all kind of classified systems, yet she was calling the Iranian foreign ministry before and after briefings to Congress about their nuclear program.” (We assume he’s talking about Wendy Sherman, whose only defense of human rights in Iran was “saying things forcefully”…)
By the way, in light of the attack on Israel, the Robert Malley story may turn out to be, in the words of California Rep. Darrell Issa, the “worst State Department scandal since Alger Hiss.” Incredible details here, in this must-read piece…
Also, from the archives, here’s another must-read, about Joe Biden’s role as “Tehran’s favorite senator” thanks to his “political games.” It’s from August 2008, just after Obama chose him as his running mate. Here’s who is in the White House now...
https://www.aei.org/articles/
So, this intelligence failure is one more thing congressional Republicans have to look into. “How far did this go, how much influence, how deep were these tentacles?,” Waltz asked. “And was it really a failure of collection, or was it people turning a blind eye at the most senior levels?”
Similarly, after working for many years with Israeli intelligence, Hoffman was “shocked” by this failure. But he did note that Israel needs to keep information about it close to the vest right now, so they don’t expose vulnerabilities.
……..
Just a few days ago, critics were expressing concern about the Army cutting its Special Ops budget, with 10 percent fewer personnel, and shifting its focus away from counterintelligence in the Middle East. (WHAT counterintelligence?) Rep. Waltz was one of them, saying he was “stunned and appalled.” The idea sounds even crazier now…
We’ll end by quoting what retired Green Beret Lt. Scott Mann said very presciently just days before the attack: “You know, they are regenerating in Afghanistan and there is very good chance that we could see a resurgence of them. And you can’t mass produce Special OPS after an emergency occurs; that is a Special Operations point.” Also, “al-Qaida and ISIS have an enduring desire to strike the homeland. They’ve proven that they can and they will. And they now have a new unfettered safe haven in Afghanistan. And they’re gonna make that happen.”
….
RELATED READING: For when you have time, Alex Marlow, author of the new book BREAKING BIDEN, has an unsparing explanation of why Biden bears responsibility for Hamas’ attack on Israel. Our hope would be that editorial writers at THE NEW YORK TIMES who actually blamed Trump for this --- not kidding, and they never mentioned Obama or Biden or their Iran policy --- would read it, but of course, they won’t.
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