Tag: joe biden

BIDEN ADMIN DEPLOYED AIR FORCE TEAM TO ISRAEL TO ASSIST WITH TARGETS, DOCUMENT SUGGESTS

TARGETING INTELLIGENCE — THE information used to conduct airstrikes and fire long-range artillery weapons — has played a central role in Israel’s siege of Gaza. A document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggests that the U.S. Air Force sent officers specializing in this exact form of intelligence to Israel in late November.

Since the start of Israel’s bombardment in retaliation for Hamas’s strike on October 7, Israel has dropped more than 29,000 bombs on the tiny Gaza Strip, according to a U.S. intelligence reportOpens in a new tab last month. And for the first timeOpens in a new tab in U.S. history, the Biden administration has been flying surveillance drone missions over Gaza since at least early November, ostensibly for hostage recoveryOpens in a new tab by special forces. At the time the drones were revealed, U.S. Gen. Pat Ryder insistedOpens in a new tab that the special operations forces deployed to Israel to advise on hostage rescue were “not participating in [Israel Defense Forces] target development.”

“I’ve directed my team to share intelligence and deploy additional experts from across the United States government to consult with and advise the Israeli counterparts on hostage recovery efforts,” saidOpens in a new tab President Joe Biden three days after the Hamas attack. 

But several weeks later, on November 21, the U.S. Air Force issued deployment guidelinesOpens in a new tab for officers, including intelligence engagement officers, headed to Israel. Experts say that a team of targeting officers like this would be used to provide satellite intelligence to the Israelis for the purpose of offensive targeting. 

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Biden was only told TODAY that Lloyd Austin, 70, had prostate cancer – a month after he was diagnosed: Details of communication failure over secret ICU trip spark more questions for the White House and Pentagon

President Joe Biden was told that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had prostate cancer on Tuesday – the same day the public was informed, sparking more questions about the transparency of the administration and whether the public can trust their government.

‘Nobody at the White House knew that Secretary Austin had prostate cancer until this morning and the President was informed immediately after we were,’ White House spokesman John Kirby said at the daily press briefing. 

Kirby got defensive as he was repeatedly queried about why the commander-in-chief didn’t know the conditions or the where abouts of his top military officer. Austin was diagnosised with cancer a month before his Dec. 22 surgery. He was released the next day and returned to the hosptial via ambulance on Jan. 1 for complications. Biden was told Austin was in the hospital on Jan. 4. 

‘We all recognize that this didn’t unfold the way it should, on so many levels, not just the notification process of the chain of command, but the transparency issue. We all recognize that. And I think we all want to make sure we learn from that,’ Kirby said. 

‘It’s certainly not good, which is why we want to learn from this and we want to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.’

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Biden Admin Reverses Decision to Remove William Penn Statue

The Biden administration has reversed a decision by the National Park Service to remove a statue of William Penn from a park in Philadelphia. Penn was the founder of Pennsylvania (named for his father) in the late 1600s and is a revered figure in the state.

(Previous TGP report on the planned removal of the statue posted by David Greyson at this link.)

The Park Service recently announced plans to renovate the park where the statue is located, Welcome Park, to make it “inclusive” of Native Americans, even thought the park is built where Penn’s home once stood and is named after the ship, the Welcome, that brought Penn to the New World from England in 1682. The Park Service also planned to remove a replica of Penn’s home, the Slate Roof House, as well as a Penn timeline on a wall at the park. In other words, the Biden administration was erasing Penn.

The Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service, is led by Biden appointee Secretary Deb Haaland, a radical progressive who is the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary.

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Lloyd Austin: White House not told for days defence secretary in hospital

The Biden administration was not told for days that US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin had been hospitalised, at least one official has told US media.

Mr Austin, 70, was admitted to the Walter Reed Medical Center on Monday due to complications following surgery.

An official told the BBC’s US partner CBS that the White House was not informed of this until at least Thursday morning.

Mr Austin has accepted responsibility for the lack of communication.

“I recognise I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed,” he said in a statement.

“I commit to doing better.”

The defence secretary sits just below the president in the chain of command for the US military.

Mr Austin added that it was “important to say: this was my medical procedure, and I take full responsibility for my decisions about disclosure”.

“I am very glad to be on the mend and look forward to returning to the Pentagon soon.”

He is thought to still be in hospital but a defence department spokesperson quoted by the AFP news agency said he resumed his full duties on Friday.

It is not clear how many of his responsibilities Mr Austin has been able to carry out due to his illness, nor the extent to which Deputy Secretary of Defence Kathleen Hicks stepped in to help.

Officials told CNN that she had periodically taken on his duties during his time in hospital, while she herself was in Puerto Rico on holiday.

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AI Watermarking Is Advocated by Biden’s Advisory Committee Member, Raising Concerns for Parody and Memes

The Biden administration doesn’t seem quite certain how to do it – but it would clearly like to see AI watermarking implemented as soon as possible, despite the idea being marred by many misgivings.

And, even despite what some reports admit is a lack of consensus on “what digital watermark is.” Standards and enforcement regulation are also missing. As has become customary, where the government is constrained or insufficiently competent, it effectively enlists private companies.

With the standards problem, these seem to none other than tech dinosaur Adobe, and China’s TikTok.

It’s hardly a conspiracy theory to think the push mostly has to do with the US presidential election later this year, as watermarking of this kind can be “converted” from its original stated purpose – into a speech-suppression tool.

The publicly presented argument in favor is obviously not quite that, although one can read between the lines. Namely – AI watermarking is promoted as a “key component” in combating misinformation, deepfakes included.

And this is where perfectly legal and legitimate genres like parody and memes could suffer from AI watermarking-facilitated censorship.

Spearheading the drive, such as it is, is Biden’s National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee and now one of its members, Carnegie Mellon University’s Ramayya Krishnan, admits there are “enforcement issues” – but is still enthusiastic about the possibility of using technology that “labels how content was made.”

From the Committee’s point of view, a companion AI tool would be a cherry on top.

However, there’s still no actual cake. Different companies are developing watermarking which can be put in three categories: visible, invisible (i.e., visible only to algorithms), and based on cryptographic metadata.

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Biden Is Overseeing the Silent Death of the First Amendment

In early 2024, a new, grim chapter may be written in the annals of journalistic history. Julian Assange, the publisher of Wikileaks, could board a plane for extradition to the United States, where he faces up to 175 years in prison on espionage charges for the crime of publishing newsworthy information.

The persecution of Assange is clear evidence that the Biden administration is overseeing the silent death of the First Amendment—with global consequences.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s exposé during the Watergate scandal is seen as a triumph of truth over power. Their investigative reporting led to the downfall of President Nixon, cementing their status as champions of press freedom. However, what if this tale had taken a dark turn, with the journalists prosecuted for espionage and silenced under the guise of national security? While this is mere fiction, Assange’s plight is all too real.

Assange, the standard-bearer of our era’s investigative journalism, awaits extradition in a British cell in Belmarsh Prison, a fate that could stifle the beacon of transparency he represents. At a time when the world grapples with the erosion of press freedom, with journalists imprisoned and killed, Assange’s case raises profound questions about the consequences of challenging power and unveiling uncomfortable realities.

The legacy of WikiLeaks goes beyond exposing government misconduct; it pierces the veil of secrecy shrouding global affairs. The release of Collateral Murder, the haunting camera footage from a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad showing the murder of several civilians, including two Reuters journalists, shocked the world. As we’ve seen in the past two months, the killing of civilians and journalists in war continues. In the last two months, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed dozens of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. On Thursday, human rights groups determined that Israel had deliberately fired on a Reuters journalist in southern Lebanon—a blatant war crime.

The aim of targeting journalists is to keep information where governments want it—under lock and key. That is why Wikileaks is such a threat—because, since its founding, it has fearlessly worked to wrest that information out of the hands of the powerful and put it in the hands of the people.

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Tensions in the Red Sea Setting the Stage for WWIII

In recent weeks, there have been 15 attacks on cargo ships in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea as the Houthis of northern Yemen threatened to attack any vessel heading to the Israeli port city of Eilat.

These attacks caused imports to the port to drop 85% and prompted the formation of a 10-nation coalition led by the US to secure maritime trade. News reports surfaced that Spain and France pulled out of the naval task force, stating they would protect their ships and only accept orders from NATO, not CENTCOM.

On December 23, an Indian-flagged cargo ship was struck in the Arabian Sea 200 nautical miles from the Indian port city of Veraval, and less than an hour later, the Israeli and US governments were claiming they had intelligence the drone was fired from Iran.

The US, EU, and Israel have all accused Iran of having a command ship disguised as a cargo vessel anchored in the Red Sea off Yemen’s northwest coast named the MV Saviz that is identifying ships linked to Israel and handing that information off to the Houthis. In 2021, it was reported that Israeli commandos bombed the Saviz using limpet mines. Iran claims the Saviz is a logistical ship to help protect the region from piracy.

The USS Laboon, a guided missile Destroyer, patrolled the waters around Yemen as part of Operation Prosperity Guardian over the weekend. Meanwhile, the country exploded in a planned protest to show support for Gaza, where an estimated 2.2 million Yemenis marched through Sanaa.

Many people waved Palestinian flags and banners that read, “Your coalition does not intimidate us!” The Supreme Leader of the Sanaa government, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, addressed the crowd via a large screen and loudspeakers, stating that if the US or the UK interrupted their operations on Israeli-linked ships, they would directly target “American and British ships in the region.”

Hours later, CENTCOM announced that the USS Laboon shot down four drones fired from Houthi-controlled northern Yemen that were “inbound to the USS Laboon.” The USS Laboon reported no damage or injuries and continued its mission, guiding a US cargo ship through the Bel el Mandeb Strait to the Suez Canal. Reports then began to surface about a secret plan between the US and the UK to attack Houthi missile sites in northern Yemen with Reaper drones from Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.

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How Joe Biden Became America’s Top Israel Hawk

Last month, a reporter asked President Joe Biden about the chances for a ceasefire in Gaza. More than 10,000 people had already been killed there, most of them women and children. Food, water, and medical supplies were scarce. Still, the president did not hesitate in assessing the odds of a ceasefire that he had more power than almost anyone in the world to help bring about.

“None,” Biden replied. “No possibility.” Biden’s unconditional support for Israel as it waged one of the most devastating bombing campaigns in modern history was already at odds with most of the world and significant parts of his own political base. The president showed no sign of backing down.

It would take another month and nearly 8,000 more Palestinian deaths for Biden to criticize Israel in any meaningful way. At a closed-door fundraiser last week, he warned that Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” was costing the country international support. But Biden’s own support for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remained largely intact. After saying he favored the eventual creation of a Palestinian state, he reiterated his unwavering backing for the Jewish nation. “We’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel,” Biden said. “Not a single thing.”

Much of Biden’s deference to Israel is deeply personal. As his supporters have put it, he identifies with the nation in his kishkes—his guts. That can be seen in the highly emotional and graphic way in which he has talked about victims of the Hamas attack being massacred, sexually assaulted, and taken hostage.

Both before and after October 7, the empathy Biden is known for has rarely extended to Palestinians. Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, said such statements are missing “to the degree that I don’t really think he sees the Palestinians at all.” In contrast, Khalidi added, Biden sees Israelis “as they are very carefully presented by their government and their massive information apparatus.”

A former Biden administration official shared a similar perspective with me. “The President does not seem to acknowledge the humanity of all parties affected by this conflict,” this person said. “He has described Israeli suffering in great detail, while Palestinian suffering is left vague if mentioned at all.”

This article is based on conversations with former members of the Obama and Biden administrations, interviews with leading experts on Israel and Palestine, and a review of hundreds of mostly forgotten congressional hearings, speeches, and articles in which the president has explained how he sees the conflict. Together, they reveal instinctive sympathy for Israel contrasted by incuriosity about Palestinians; an increasingly outdated view of the domestic politics on the issue; and a deep commitment to a repeatedly disproven belief that peace will only come from there being “no daylight” between Israel and the United States. (The National Security Council did not make any officials available for an interview for this story.)

The result is that Biden has prioritized providing Israel largely unconditional support and the space to continue fighting in the face of intense international opposition. This approach is predictable in some respects. Israel has gotten almost whatever it wants from the United States for decades, and any American president would have supported Israel in the wake of a Hamas attack that took the lives of 1,200 people. 

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Why fears about Biden’s marijuana moves are overblown

President Joe Biden’s administration is poised to make the biggest shift in federal drug policy in decades by loosening marijuana restrictions, but the move is sparking blowback from an unlikely constituency: legalization advocates.

They argue that moving marijuana to a lower classification would do nothing to address the federal-state divide in marijuana laws, fail to address the impacts of criminalization, disrupt existing state-regulated cannabis markets, lead multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies to dominate the medical cannabis industry and spur a potential federal crackdown.

Howard Sklamberg, an attorney and former top official at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, argues those fears are alarmist and misguided. He doesn’t believe the cannabis industry needs to worry about a crackdown if the drug is moved from Schedule I to III under the Controlled Substances Act, as recommended by the Food and Drug Administration after a review of the scientific evidence.

“If you’re going to launch an enforcement initiative against cannabis, why would you start off with saying, ‘Oh, by the way, it’s less of a risk than we thought,’” Sklamberg said in an interview with POLITICO. “You would use your power under Schedule I and go after it.”

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