What Happened Today: June 6, 2023
Massive dam blown in Ukraine; Crypto under regulatory fire; Is the government hiding aliens?
The Big Story
Ukraine and Russian officials are each accusing the other side of sabotaging the Kakhovka dam on Tuesday morning, after the dam, located in the city of Nova Kakhovka in Ukraine’s Kherson region, burst and released a torrent of water downstream across both Russian-occupied territory south of the Dnipro River and Ukrainian territory to the north. The Kakhovka Reservoir, the size of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, provides water to cool the upstream Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and supplies water to farmers across the region, including those in Russian-controlled Crimea. Thousands of people have fled the area or been evacuated following the dam’s collapse.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has denied striking the dam and said Tuesday, “It is physically impossible to blow it up somehow from the outside—with shelling. It was mined. It was mined by the Russian occupiers and blown up by them.”
Meanwhile, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu alleges that the Ukrainians blew it up to prevent a Russian offensive against Kherson, a territorially significant city. While the who and the how are still murky, a Washington Post article from December 2022 reported that Ukrainian commanders had conducted a test strike on the dam with a HIMARS launcher in case they needed to raise the level of the river for strategic reasons.
In Washington, D.C., House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is holding firm on his commitment to prevent the allocation of more funding to Ukraine beyond what was approved in last week’s debt ceiling deal. “What about the money we have already spent? What is the money for and what is victory?” asked the Speaker.
Read More: https://www.wsj.com/articles/major-dam-destroyed-in-russian-occupied-ukraine-8cd10725
In the Back Pages: Team Biden Mainstreams Terror Financing in Lebanon
The Rest
→ On Monday, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and its founder, Changpeng Zhao, alleging that they have “engaged in an extensive web of deception, conflicts of interest, lack of disclosure, and calculated evasion of the law.” Those allegations, along with charges of improperly mixing customer funds, are also what led to the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. On Tuesday, SEC Chair Gary Gensler went for the double play, bringing a suit against the largest crypto exchange in the United States, Coinbase. The suit alleges that Coinbase has essentially been operating illegally for years, selling unregistered securities and naming specific “coins” as securities. Gensler has previously said that Bitcoin does not count as a security and has been vague on the definition for the second largest currency, Ethereum. The SEC rules being applied in these lawsuits could “kill off almost all of crypto,” Omid Malekan, adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, told Bloomberg.
On Monday, an out-of-this-world story appeared in The Debrief, with a Department of Defense whistleblower claiming to have knowledge of a secret government recovery program that has obtained numerous alien (non-human) craft as well as the non-human pilots and passengers on these craft, though it remains unclear if they are dead or alive. The program has allegedly been concealed from both the American public and the congressional commission within the DoD responsible for investigating unidentified airspace activity.
The whistleblower, David Charles Grusch, has been verified by two investigative journalists covering this topic, including one former NYT reporter. A former intelligence officer in the military, Grusch had worked as a liaison to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.
Grusch’s claims about recovery of non-human craft was corroborated in the story by Jonathan Grey, an officer at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, who told The Debrief, “The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone.”
In late 2020, Haim Eshed, former head of Israel’s Defense Ministry space division, said something similar, alleging that the United States and the extraterrestrials have an agreement and have been in touch for many years but do not feel the public is ready for that knowledge.
Some have expressed doubt that this isn’t just yet another military intelligence psychological operation. Edward Dowd, a former BlackRock portfolio manager, wrote on May 23, “Things are so ridiculous right now, it wouldn’t shock me to see an alien visitation on the eve of nuclear war to unite the globe.”
→ Farmers Insurance employees are livid at their new CEO, Raul Vargas, who wants them back in the office. Last year, many of the company’s employees rearranged their lives after the company said it was embracing remote work. But last month, Vargas announced he wanted people back in the office three days a week, starting in September, as he believes it will enhance “collaboration, creativity, and innovation.” Soon after, 2,000 negative comments were posted on the company’s internal message board as the new requirements will become a logistical nightmare for some staffers. “I sold my house and moved closer to my grandkids. So sad that I made a huge financial decision based on a lie,” said one employee. Vargas, however, is sticking to his guns: “We read all your comments. We understand and we appreciate them. But we’re still moving forward.”
→ Two-year-old Mohammed Tamimi, who died after being shot in the head by an IDF soldier in what Israeli authorities are describing as an unintended collateral killing, was buried on Tuesday in his village of Nabi Saleh, in the West Bank. According to preliminary findings from the IDF, Tamimi was caught in the cross fire after multiple shooters fired in the direction of the Israeli settlement of Neveh Tzuf at around 8 p.m. on Thursday. A soldier returned fired toward a car he believed to be the origin of the shots, hitting Mohammed. Even after an IDF medical evacuation and treatment at Israel’s Tel Hashomer hospital, Mohammed succumbed to his wounds on Monday.
→ At a school assembly at Kellogg High School in Kellogg, Idaho, where the upperclassmen give wisdom to the younger students, senior Travis Lohr said during his speech, “Guys are guys and girls are girls. There is no in-between.” The school then told Lohr he wouldn’t be allowed to walk in his graduation ceremony, scheduled for June 3. Last Friday, a peaceful protest in favor of Lohr took place at the school, but “safety concerns” and worry about “outside agitators” caused the school to cancel Saturday’s graduation until the ceremony can be “held safely.” Popular bus driver Dakota Mailloux was fired over his participation in the protest for Lohr. He told the Idaho Freedom Foundation, “I’m sorry I won’t be driving anymore and that I will miss them all very much! I hope they always stand up for themselves, even if it’s hard. It has been an honor and a privilege.”
→ The Israeli Football Association barred firebrand team Beitar Jerusalem from playing in European competition after its fans stormed the field in a May 23 victory over Maccabi Netanya. Apparently, the celebration was so rowdy, it “became a shameful and humiliating event, the likes of which Israeli football has never known in a situation like this,” according to the association. Beitar has the most intense fans in Israeli soccer and, just like its European soccer hooligan counterparts, some of the most openly racist. The team has never hired an Arab player likely due to fear of fan backlash, and it lost two Chechen Muslim players after they left the club following constant verbal abuse from fans.
→ Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker struck down Tennessee’s Adult Entertainment Act on free speech grounds on Friday. The law broadly discouraged drag performances in any location where they might be viewed by a minor by making it a misdemeanor to perform content which could be “harmful to minors.” The judge felt the law was overly broad and infringed on the freedom of speech of the performers, writing in his decision, “The ‘harmful to minors’ standard lowers the floor for criminal behavior, equipping law enforcement officers with even more discretion. The chance that an officer could abuse that wide discretion is troubling given an art form like drag that some would say purposefully challenges the limits of society's accepted norms.”
→ Bexar, Texas, county sheriff Javier Salazar filed criminal charges on Monday against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on the grounds of “unlawful restraint” of migrants who were shipped from Florida to Martha’s Vineyard under false pretenses. Also on Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called DeSantis a “small, pathetic man” and accused him of essentially kidnapping migrants over his deportation practices. Meanwhile, in a barbershop sit-down in Chicago, Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy pointed out that the leadership of cities like Chicago who’ve declared their cities to be “sanctuary cities” have essentially invited governors like DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott to send migrants their way. “I don’t blame, in this case, the person who is saying, ‘I’m protecting the residents of my state.’ If somebody else wants to say they’re a sanctuary city, and the people actually send them, it’s your mayor who bears the responsibility for that.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
A Farewell to Armbands by Carlos Dengler
I look back to the heady days of anything-goes postmodernism, when I was a rock star with a taste for fascist drag. Why did I do it?
The Pizza I Couldn’t Leave Behind When I Converted to Judaism by Kat Romanow
Tweaking my great-grandfather’s recipe allowed me to create a Jewish identity that honors my Italian heritage
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Team Biden Mainstreams Terror Financing in Lebanon
Fifteen years of U.S. aid to ‘state security’ arms like the LAF and ISF have cost American taxpayers billions while harming Israel and strengthening Hezbollah
By Tony Badran
So obsessed is the Biden administration with the dubious art of using taxpayer dollars to underwrite the Lebanese pseudo-state run by the terrorist group Hezbollah that it has spent its two years in office coming up with legally questionable schemes to pay the salaries of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), setting new precedents in the abuse of U.S. foreign security assistance programs. In January, the administration rolled out its program to provide direct salary payments, in cash, to both the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Internal Security Forces (ISF). This time around, the White House won’t be delivering the cash on pallets, as Obama did when he bribed Iran. Rather, it will disburse the crisp dollar bills through the U.N. Development Program. The result is the same: The U.S. government’s giant cash pump is working overtime to benefit a terror group that has purposefully maimed and killed hundreds of Americans.
The scale of U.S. financing of Lebanon’s Hezbollah-dominated military apparatus cannot be understated: around 100,000 Lebanese are now getting cash stipends courtesy of the American taxpayer to spend in Hezbollah-land. But a small thing like the U.S. becoming massively complicit in financing terrorism hardly causes Team Obama-Biden to bat an eyelid. As the administration’s nominee for the next ambassador to Lebanon, Lisa Johnson, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month, if confirmed she would “continue to advocate for very strong, robust security assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces and Internal Security Forces.” And that’s because “they’re doing a great job of bolstering stability and security in this part of the world.”
No doubt. And as a testament to the exceptional job the LAF is doing, Johnson’s comments came a couple of weeks after Hezbollah fired or allowed the firing of 34 rockets across the border and dispatched a bomber from Lebanon deep into Israel, and a few days before the group put on a large military exercise to which it invited local and international media.
Whereas the LAF’s standing as a U.S.-equipped military support system for Hezbollah is well-established, the ISF usually doesn’t receive as much attention. A recent ISF accomplishment, however, did make headlines: “Lebanon busts suspected Israeli ‘spy networks,’” read an AFP headline last year. According to the Lebanese authorities, the ISF’s hard-working Information Branch uncovered no less than 17 networks inside Lebanese territory supposedly spying for Israel.
The Hezbollah mouthpiece, al-Akhbar, which first reported the story, said the ISF uncovered a breach within Hezbollah’s ranks, which it shared with the group, leading to that person’s detention by Hezbollah’s security apparatus. Other alleged spies were said to be collecting intelligence on Hamas in Lebanon; another was a Syrian in Damascus who was said to have been providing intelligence on various locales there. Within a month, the ISF had busted more individuals in south Lebanon for supposedly spying for Israel. News of this feat was even carried by Iranian media.
Echoing Lisa Johnson, Hezbollah heaped praise on the ISF for doing a great job of bolstering stability and security and encouraged further coordination. And no wonder: If your definition of Lebanese security is for Hezbollah to grow stronger, then having a U.S.-equipped and trained security service to do your counterintelligence dirty work is certainly a boon. Although the ISF had regularly uncovered alleged Israeli spies before, al-Akhbar noted that the bust of the 17 networks represented one of the largest such operations since 2009.
It was in the spring of that year, shortly after the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) launched its assistance program for the ISF, that the Lebanese counterintelligence force helpfully uncovered an Israeli infiltration of Hezbollah’s ranks. The then-head of the ISF shared the intelligence with the group. An article in the Los Angeles Times, citing Lebanese officials and an unnamed Western diplomat, reported that the Lebanese redirected for use against Israel signal-detection equipment provided to them to fight Islamic militants. Israeli national security reporters likewise reported similar claims. Meanwhile, a Hezbollah intelligence official told Time that the investigations involved the ISF and Hezbollah exchanging information.
In other words, the concurrence of the growth of ISF capabilities, thanks to U.S. support, and the intensification of counterintelligence operations against Israel was no coincidence. Nor was it an anomaly. Rather, enhancing Hezbollah’s internal security and its operations against Israel has been a feature of the U.S. assistance program since its inception all the way to the present.
This is hardly an accident. For U.S. policymakers, synergy between the LAF/ISF and Hezbollah is baked into their policy, which is predicated on fostering and building up a common anti-Israel posture that joins Lebanon’s so-called “state institutions” with the country’s dominant terror group. The implicit meaning of the U.S. bureaucratic mantra that U.S. assistance aims to “undermine Hezbollah’s narrative that its weapons are necessary to defend Lebanon” is precisely that the LAF/ISF and the Lebanese terror group are jointly competing to achieve the same goals—namely, defending Lebanon from Israel. The LAF/ISF using U.S. and Western assistance to uncover Israeli cells, therefore, is well within bounds of the stated U.S. policy; in fact, it is proof that the policy is “succeeding.”
It should be emphasized here that the use of U.S. funding, training, and equipment to target Israel and secure Hezbollah’s interests is not an accidental byproduct of U.S. Lebanon policy; rather, it is the policy. The U.S. itself has used the Lebanese security agencies and military either as a backdoor to pass intelligence to Hezbollah, as it did in the early days of the Syrian war, when Hezbollah was facing blowback from its military intervention in Syria, or simply to allow the LAF and the security agencies to protect Hezbollah’s rear inside Lebanon.
The policy itself is the product of the moment when the Obama administration was openly talking about partnering with Iran and its IRGC militias (see, Iraq) to “defeat ISIS.” ISIS, therefore, became perfect cover for the broader regional realignment and for coordination between Hezbollah and the military and security agencies. The policy, therefore, puts on display the dividends of realignment while demonstrating to Iran the U.S. commitment to protecting Iranian “equities” that Obama directly promised in his letter to Khamenei.
Of course, Hezbollah, as the only power in Beirut, sets the parameters of this process. When the former head of the ISF’s Information Branch was perceived to have crossed a line with regard to involvement in the war in Syria against the Assad regime, he was eliminated in 2012.
With ISIS gone and Assad securely in power, Team Obama-Biden is pushing a new play to promote its policy of “regional integration”—that is, encouraging Arab states to invest in Iranian holdings to promote a U.S.-backed, Iranian-dominated regional order. Today’s excuse is fighting “captagon,” the cheap amphetamine pill popular throughout the region.
The administration, which has spent the last two-and-a-half years pathologically pressuring the Saudis to underwrite Lebanon, doubtless will trumpet the “outstanding effort” the ISF and LAF are making, despite severe economic challenges, to combat captagon smuggling, in order to prod the Saudis to open the spigots to finance everything from LAF/ISF salaries to the building of a new LAF naval base at the Beirut port—or whatever other pet project Team Biden-Obama dreams up to decorate Hezbollah-land.
Last October, a few months after the ISF uncovered the Israeli cells, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut celebrated 15 years of U.S. funding for the ISF. The current nominee for ambassador, who recently served as principal deputy assistant secretary for INL, and her two predecessors have all endorsed and promoted the underwriting of the Hezbollah auxiliary forces who run counterintelligence for the terror group.
Amusingly, former U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Elizabeth Richard, during whose tenure LAF-Hezbollah coordination and joint deployment intensified under the American cover of “defeating ISIS,” and who oversaw the building of U.S. taxpayer-funded facilities for the ISF academy, is now the administration’s nominee for coordinator for counterterrorism. The current ambassador, Dorothy Shea, who pioneered the legally flimsy precedent of making direct cash payments to the LAF and ISF—a dodge that will probably implicate the U.S. in financing terrorism—has been nominated to be the deputy representative to the U.N. Meanwhile, current ambassadorial nominee Lisa Johnson assures us of her commitment to the policy of financing counterintelligence for Hezbollah.
The 15-year-long effort to fund and strengthen Hezbollah’s terror empire has cost the American taxpayer billions of dollars while doing untold damage to Israeli security as well as to the people inside Lebanon condemned to live under the terror group’s rule. Now it seems that price may pale next to the bizarre mainstreaming of terror financing as an arm of U.S. foreign policy.
Republicans hold the House, hence the pursestrings. This CRIMINAL behavior by the Biden (Obama) admins should be cut off AND prosecuted!
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Financing a terrorist organization is not a smart move but is a totally expected move from the 3-rd Obama administration.