Josh Paul

Akbar, I want to talk about the dissent inside the administration.

So to go back to the main content of your book, and I know you describe it at length, but can you just give us all a, in general, we can come back, maybe it was follow-up, but in general, what kind of dissent? I remember very clearly there was Josh, I think Josh Paul was his name, and a series of others early on.

And then there was the kind of formal dissent channel through the State Department to Blinken.

And there was that at the beginning.

Blinken on the one hand, but really Biden on the other.

Was he aware of this kind of dissent? Did he dismiss it? Was it something that was irrelevant? Did he think they were just being anti-Semitic or something along those lines?

So, you know, I broke the story of Josh Paul's resignation.

That was quite early.

You know, it was a really broad attack, and there were various aspects of it that even the Israelis couldn't get a handle of immediately.

What I think is important from that early period in terms of the warning signs, the indicators that this was going to be s- more severe than any past moment in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and risk a level of US complicity in atrocities, mass, mass immiseration, all of those indicators were al- were already flashing red, right? So if we think about inside the government, uh, right up by October 8th, people at the State Department, figures like Josh Paul, who later resigned, I, I broke the news of his resignation, were asking colleagues, "Look, is it wise to be sending the Israelis bombs that are this large?" When you're talking about a population in Gaza that is 85% urbanized, 2.2 million people in many intensely packed neighborhoods, refugee camps.

Uh, there were people inside the administration talking about trying to learn a bit from the US's own post-9/11 intensive military operations abroad, right? That very often fueled backlash, led to massacres of civilians, and, and didn't have a kind of strategic and moral sort of goal and alignment.

There were US officials already talking about, "Look, should we tell the Israelis that if they want our continued support, we need to see a battle plan from them?" Right? You saw these quite absolutist comments immediately from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others talking about destroying Hamas.

Uh, there was a lot of smoke, maybe not much fire there.

Looking back now on that chapter of, of, of that reporting of, of all these resignations from Josh Paul and others, d- how do, how do you reflect on, on, on that?

I think the scale of the discontent is so much broader than the resignations.

You know, the people who resign sacrificing their careers to take a public stand, that, that, of course, is a really principled and, and brave thing to do.

I also will say that, you know, people like Samantha Power, Jon Finer, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who was a, an ambassador to the UN, did come close to resigning.

Repeatedly told people they had considered it, decided not to, and their argument was, of course, "We are in here being internal critics of the policy.

We're influencing it to some way." I would say that that doesn't fully absolve them of responsibility, because those high level resignations, as you say, could have sent that message that is much bigger than a Josh Paul leaving, right? And, and we've seen Finer say now in interviews, "If I resign, it was a, it would be a one-day story." He would tell friends, "Well, no one will care." I do think we would have cared if the US Deputy National Security Advisor had resigned and said, "This policy is a failure and dishonest." And so we have to think about those counterfactuals and the fact that people who stayed in, despite being deeply uncomfortable with the policy, feeling it was wrong, how they enabled it to, to persist.

I want to say on this, um, idea of the, the careerist factors that influence people's decisions.

I want to ask you about somebody who you interviewed.

I also interviewed, and that's Josh Paul, one of those who used the internal dissent channel and then spoke out about what he viewed as some of what you're telling us regarding the Biden administration's policy on Gaza.

I'm going to play this soundbite.

I have heard from actually so many hundreds of colleagues at this point who support what I did, who are fighting the fighters, as it were, within the bureaucracy, trying to make a difference within their capacities, within the State Department, within the Defense Department, within the White House, on the congressional staff, members of Congress as well.

I have been actually really encouraged by the number of people who have reached out to say that they are finding what is happening both a moral disaster and a policy disaster for the United States and really want to see if they can change and set the ship on a better course.

So, Mr. Ahmed, that was Josh Paul in December 2023, so fairly early after October 7th.

And he was also talking about, and he resigned, over the U.S., that administration's sale of some of these worst weapons that were really, really very heavy and not designed to be used in densely populated civilian areas.

So what... does your reporting say about those who did try to steer the administration away from this? And actually, let me nail it down some more.

It's incredible.

And, you know, Josh Paul and his group right now and others, I'm sure, are trying like hell to get this Congress to block this.

Do you think it will be blocked? Well, it should be given the law.

I mean, anybody looking at the law and thinking about what this means and how much ordinance this is and how beyond any rational need it is, it ought to be stopped.

So I broke the news of the first resignee.

His name was Josh Paul from the State Department.

And this was someone who I had covered as someone enabling weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia for its horrific military campaign in Yemen.

So by no means a dove within the US policy establishment.

And I appreciate you kind of drawing that parallel to Iran.

But they made a difference to the public organizing and to the public advocacy, right? To have these government experts like Josh Paul and arms sales experts, Stacey Gilbert, a humanitarian aid expert.

have these people who worked on other crises, other situations and said, this US policy of enabling Israel and Gaza is unlike anything we have ever seen and against our best professional advice.

With the split memos and the kind of disregarding of those folks who were quitting, What happened was what one official described to me as kind of herd impunity, right? So if you kind of discount, disregard the expertise and the dissent from within your own administration, it gives you a level of plausible deniability.

And you always talk about the moral hazard, you know, the moral bankruptcy, and this certainly contributes to that, I think.

You know, we had Josh Paul speak at our conference a week and a half or so ago, and he would be the person in the State Department right now if he were still there.

He was the... office chief for the political military affairs section they are the ones who approve the transfer of weapons to foreign countries and he is the one who resigned under the body administration when they kept providing weapons that were clearly anti-personnel anti-civilian weapons he resigned because they wouldn't take his uh his advice uh on board which is we should stop killing innocent people now if you go to that next one the very last clip now I'll just finish out with one thing that Dave DeCampo at Anti-War pointed out.

Go forward to the very last one.