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There always are! Is anyone held accountable?
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‘Serious’ errors let Hamas infiltrate kibbutz on Oct. 7, per internal IDF probe
The investigation shows that “the security forces did not provide sufficient warning to the residents of Be’eri about the infiltration of terrorists during the first hours of the terrorist attack.”
By Akiva Van Koningsveld
Nearly 350 Hamas terrorists, including 100 members of the terror group’s elite Nukhba Force, managed to infiltrate Kibbutz Be’eri in southern Israel on Oct. 7 due to catastrophic failures by the Israel Defense Forces in their readiness and response, according to the first part of the IDF’s internal probe of the attacks.
“The IDF had difficulty creating a clear picture of what was happening in the kibbutz until the afternoon hours of Oct. 7, even though the yishuv emergency team had an updated picture of what was happening in the kibbutz during the morning hours,” per the Hebrew report, which the military released on Thursday evening.
“The investigation shows that the security forces did not provide sufficient warning to the residents of Be’eri about the infiltration of terrorists during the first hours of the terrorist attack,” the report adds.
In the early hours of the attack on Oct. 7, a Shabbat morning, fighting at the kibbutz “was characterized by a lack of command and control and a lack of coordination and order between the various forces and units,” per the investigation, which took three months and drew on hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of materials.
“This caused a number of incidents in which security forces gathered at the entrance to the kibbutz and did not engage in combat immediately,” it stated.
The IDF presented the findings to the kibbutz community, and the families of victims and hostages, before releasing them publicly.
A few hours prior to the public release of the investigation, members of the kibbutz said that the probe was thorough but left important questions unanswered, Israeli media reported.
Israeli media also reported that family members of Be’eri victims called for IDF leaders to resign.
IDF Maj. Gen. (ret.) Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, told JNS that the internal probe, though “serious and professional,” was unable to answer the most pressing question of how the Oct. 7 catastrophe could have happened.
“To answer this question, the investigation should have begun top-down—from the general staff all the way down to the specific events,” Eiland told JNS.
Eran Lerman, vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told JNS that the Israeli military’s ability to accept responsibility for the Oct. 7 failures must now be translated into a far-reaching reform of long-neglected aspects of the defense doctrine.
“Local response forces and reserve forces dedicated to a quick counterattack would have provided the necessary response, rather than the disorganized arrival of special forces from all over—brave as they may have been,” said Lerman, a former deputy director of Israel’s National Security Council.
‘Acts of heroism’
According to the investigation, Hamas killed 101 civilians at Be’eri and kidnapped 32 people, 11 of whom remain hostages in Gaza. The probe credited the local armed response team with “determination and courage.”
“Their bravery, in defending the kibbutz and its residents with their bodies, should be considered a miracle,” the investigation states. “It was this fighting that stopped the total occupation of the kibbutz and saved many lives.” The Israeli military also praised the yishuv emergency team for “forming an updated situational picture and maintaining contact with the residents under fire.”
“Many security forces fought bravely in Kibbutz Be’eri and performed acts of heroism,” the probe added. “At the same time, serious errors and mistakes were made, and we have the duty to learn, strengthen and correct for the future.”
Israeli soldiers “acted with great bravery and ferocity,” according to the investigation, and 31 were killed in combat, including 23 IDF members and armed response team members, in addition to eight police officers. Many soldiers and civilians were hurt.
Some 100 terrorists were killed at the kibbutz, per the investigation.
The report concluded that the IDF “was not prepared for the kind of extensive infiltration scenario that happened on Oct. 7, which included multiple areas of infiltration by thousands of terrorists, attacking in dozens of focal points at the same time.”
Be'eri bulldozerA bulldozer destroys a house that was damaged during the Oct. 7 massacre in Kibbutz Be’eri near the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip, as part of a project rebuilding the destroyed homes and infrastructure in the Kibbutz, July 7, 2024. Photo by Oren Cohen/Flash90.
‘Forming a complete picture of the situation’
The IDF is conducting a larger investigation into the events of Oct. 7 and its response to the terror attack. The report released on Thursday relates only to what occurred at Kibbutz Be’eri.
A “turning the tide” moment occurred when 99th Division commander Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram was appointed commander of the area, per the investigation.
“Due to the multiplicity of centers and the need for urgent solutions, a senior commander was appointed to each central combat center in order to activate the forces that arrived in the sector in an optimal and coordinated manner, so as not to rely on organic forces, an operation that would have lasted a long time,” it stated.
The appointment of Hiram wound up being “of great significance in increasing the operational effectiveness against the enemy, responding to the residents, and creating clarity in the situation and proper command of the fighting forces,” per the investigation, which added that there were times when the IDF did not safeguard evacuated residents sufficiently or provide their basic needs.
The investigation concluded that at times, “a situation arose in which forces fought to defend a post, and to evacuate and treat wounded soldiers before doing so for the civilians.”
“These cases resulted from difficulty in forming a complete picture of the situation and therefore forces that were attacked acted to defend themselves,” it added. “The imperative to act and strive for the protection of citizens must be absolutely strengthened as a supreme task before anything else. Soldiers will always give priority to treating civilians, evacuation, protection and any need that arises on the battlefield.”
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi “accepted all the findings that emerged from the investigation and ordered for them to be into future defense and combat plans,” the IDF said.
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When you have lost all moral integrity pick on the Jews.
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The war against the Jews
In Britain, France and America, the left is on the wrong side. The Jews are in the middle because they don’t know who hates them more,” said Chief Rabbi Sebbag. Opinion.
By Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips,a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel, has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy, in 2018. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.
( JNS) We have to face without flinching what is now undeniable: There is a war across the globe raging against the Jewish people. It’s a war not just to destroy their national homeland but to drive them out of people’s heads, their conscience and their world.
Led by Muslims and the left, with its base in the universities, this war has extended much further than these circles into professional and commercial life.
The Palestinian flag, the symbol of the agenda to destroy Israel and erase the identity and history of the Jews in their ancestral land, is everywhere. Often-murderous antisemitism, once confined to cranks, Nazi supporters and the clinically insane, has been normalized and is surfacing in the most banal, everyday settings.
A Toronto health food restaurant is using the hashtag “#zionistsnotwelcome” in social media posts. In Britain, an ordinary middle-aged Manchester woman declared that Zionist lives weren’t worth saving and that Zionists “need to be finished.”
Palestinian flags sprouted in London at the Wimbledon tennis tournament, during Fashion Week in Berlin and on the lapel of a Delta Airlines flight attendant. In Amsterdam, Anne Frank’s statue was defaced with “Gaza” graffiti. At a Madrid rock concert, the crowd sang: “Let’s go bomb Tel Aviv.”
While this madness has liberals and left-wingers in its grip, its main impetus is coming from the Islamic world. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines stated this week that the Iranian regime has been actively fueling the Gaza demonstrations by using agents posing as activists online, encouraging demonstrations and even providing participants with financial support.
In addition to Iran, the campaign has been orchestrated by Hamas and other Muslim Brotherhood operatives. The reason for all this is that fanatical hatred of the Jews is fundamental to the religion of Islam, as is the aim of Islamizing the world.
While many Muslims don’t subscribe to fanaticism or fundamentalism, far too many do—and the overwhelming majority subscribe to the demonization and delegitimization of Israel that flow from Muslim Jew-hatred.
The reason the Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel sparked immediate and triumphant Muslim demonstrations was the ecstatic belief that, having destroyed Israeli invincibility by murdering and capturing so many Jews, the way was now open to destroy Israel, wipe out the Jews and conquer the West for Islam.
The far-left, who have latched on to the anti-West aims of this campaign, also believe that their revolutionary time has come.
In France, this is due to the desperate attempt by President Emanuel Macron to fend off the threat of political victory by the far-right National Rally party. To do so, Macron made a deal with a left-wing alliance whose dominant party is the extreme revolutionary grouping of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed).
Its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has called French Jews and their communal organizations “aggressive,” “arrogant” and “sectarian.” He made a dismissive reference to the Jews killing Jesus, called Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza a “genocide” and said that “peace-loving Frenchmen” cannot express solidarity with the victims of the Oct. 7 onslaught.
In Britain, the left also came to power in last week’s general election with a supposedly moderate Labour government under the new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
Whether or not the French coalition lasts, the prospects for British and French relations with Israel are dismal, as are the prospects for French and British Jews.
Macron is relentlessly hostile to Israel. Last November, he told the BBC that Israel must stop killing babies and women in Gaza and that there was “no justification” for Israel’s bombing campaign. Now he has backed the request by the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor for warrants to arrest Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and has also made an alliance with a pro-Hamas party.
In Britain, Starmer is also taking a hostile position against Israel. Foreign Secretary David Lammy is considering whether to stop U.K. arms sales to Israel and has said that if the ICC issues arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, Britain will arrest them if they come to the U.K.
Starmer has also appointed some extremely troubling ministers. The Justice Secretary Shabina Mahmood is a long-standing supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement aimed at the destruction of Israel.
And the Attorney-General Richard Hermer KC—who describes himself as a “tikkun olam” (social justice) Reform Jew—has put his name on legal opinions and letters that defame Israel and are viciously hostile to its ability to defend itself.
Like Hermer, Starmer spent most of his career as a “human rights” lawyer in a radical left-wing barristers’ set. The “human rights” agenda, which is misleadingly presented as the “center ground,” is in fact a radical ideology that fuels the onslaught against Israel mounted by the United Nations, the ICC and the rest of the international law and humanitarian establishment. It also underpins anti-Western “intersectional” identity politics.
The Labour government combines support for Palestinian Arabs with an “identity politics” agenda that is likely to entrench the abuse of children and the threat to women posed by transgender ideology; put the force of law behind anti-white racism and the calumny of “white privilege”; and turn Islamophobia into a crime and thus suppress all criticism of Islam, including Muslim antisemitism.
For these reasons, Starmer is unlikely to deal with the threat that has emerged from the arrival of Islamic sectarian politics in the rise of a Muslim political bloc.
Despite near-mandatory sympathy in the Labour Party for the Palestinian Arab cause, British Muslims were angry that Starmer had supported Israel’s right to defend itself and hadn’t initially called for an immediate ceasefire. A group called Muslim Vote issued a list of demands, including turning Israel into a pariah state, as well as various ways in which Britain should adapt its society to Islam.
As a result of this decline in Muslim support, Labour lost five parliamentary seats to independent candidates standing on a “Gaza-Palestine” ticket while a number of other Labour MPs hung on to their seats by a whisker.
In France, Macron has long lost the battle to contain Muslim violence and rampant antisemitism. Three boys aged 12-13 have been accused of raping a 12-year-old Jewish girl while making anti-Israel slurs against her. A 15-year-old Jewish boy was assaulted in Paris by eight men from the far-left Jeune Garde “because he was assumed to be Jewish.” He was insulted, called a Zionist, beaten and reportedly forced to chant “Long live Palestine” while being filmed. Elsewhere, crowds with Palestinian flags shout “Death to France,” “Death to Jews” and “Death to the police.”
France’s Chief Rabbi Moshe Sebbag has said there’s no future for Jews in France and advised young Jews to go to Israel “or a more secure country.”
Like the Biden administration in America, left-wing parties in Britain and France are displaying hostility to Israel and indifference to Jewish security when Israel is under existential attack, global Jew-hatred has reached stratospheric levels and tyrants everywhere are on a roll because of the West’s refusal to defend itself or even understand the priceless values that it needs to defend.
Diaspora Jews ask where they can be safe. The answer is nowhere. Despite the anti-Semitic history of National Rally, said the French chief rabbi, the left has been anti-Semitic in recent times. “The Jews are in the middle because they don’t know who hates them more,” he said.
Everyone is defined by where they stand in this war. There is no middle ground. Whether you are an activist, fellow-traveler or useful idiot; whether you are a gentile or a “tikkun olam” Jew; either you stand unequivocally with the Jewish victims of this war and support their self-defense or you are on the side of those attacking not just the Jewish people but civilization itself.
And in Britain, France and America, the left, whether moderate or extreme, is on the wrong side.
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In time al the fake law suits against Trump will collapse. The radical Democrats could not break him financially, spiritually. He is what we need at this time in our pitiful history. A businessman who is not a politician, unorthodox in his thinking, someone who has guts, know how to exit the stage and loves America.
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Somewhere, Robert Bork Is Smiling
Originalism kept him off the Supreme Court. Now it’s the guiding philosophy of a majority of justices.
By Randy E. Barnett
Robert Bork’s 1987 nomination to the Supreme Court was defeated because of his commitment to originalism. For 30 years thereafter, no Republican nominee to the court called himself an originalist, although Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas embraced the term after joining the high court.
But 30 years after Bork was borked, Neil Gorsuch was nominated to succeed Justice Scalia. He broke the taboo, confessing during his confirmation hearings that he is an originalist. Around the same time, Justice Samuel Alito described himself as a “practical originalist.” Later, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett identified as originalists at their confirmation hearings without qualification, bringing the number of self-identified originalists to five. Even Ketanji Brown Jackson described her approach to judging in unmistakably originalist terms. All these justices acknowledged that the text of the Constitution was binding on them and the meaning of the Constitution remained the same until it was changed by amendment.
This transformation had deep intellectual and political roots. Academics developed a defensible theory of originalism, and a movement to put originalists on the court culminated in Donald Trump’s 2016 promise to do so—a promise he honored with the help of White House counsel Don McGahn.
How originalist is the court in practice? Sometimes it has reached results that are consistent with the original meaning of the text without using explicitly originalist reasoning. Justice Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) used the Court’s “substantive due process” doctrine to reach an arguably originalist result but failed to consider the original meaning of “due process of law” or “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Only Justice Thomas, in a concurrence, wanted to do that.
The term that just ended included one case that represents an unqualified triumph for originalism. In Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Assn. of America, Justice Thomas’s opinion for a 7-2 majority explicitly turned on the original meaning of “appropriations” in the Appropriations Clause. “An appropriation is simply a law that authorizes expenditures from a specified source of public money for designated purposes,” he wrote. “The statute that provides the Bureau’s funding meets these requirements. We therefore conclude that the Bureau’s funding mechanism does not violate the Appropriations Clause.” For an originalist, it doesn’t get any better than this. Justices Alito and Gorsuch dissented, but also in originalist terms. Only Justice Elena Kagan declined to join an opinion employing originalist reasoning.
In contrast, in Department of State v. Muñoz, Justice Barrett used the same substantive due process analysis that Justice Alito had used in Dobbs to find that a citizen had no constitutional “right to bring her noncitizen spouse to the United States.” To recognize an “unenumerated constitutional right,” Justice Barrett concluded, the litigant “must show that the asserted right is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.’ ” As with Dobbs, the outcome might have been consistent with originalism, but the reasoning wasn’t. And, in his majority opinion in U.S. v. Trump, Chief Justice John Roberts offered little, if any, originalist justification for the recognition of a president’s immunity for criminal prosecution after leaving office. Whatever one thinks of the outcome, this was disappointing.
Still, in other cases, several justices reaffirmed their commitment to originalism in concurring opinions. In U.S. v. Rahimi, which upheld the application of a ban on firearms ownership to a man who was subject to a domestic-violence restraining order, Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett objected to the nascent push to have “history and tradition” replace the original meaning of the text as the ultimate touchstone of constitutionality.
“For an originalist, the history that matters most is the history surrounding the ratification of the text; that backdrop illuminates the meaning of the enacted law,” Justice Barrett wrote. “Evidence of ‘tradition’ unmoored from original meaning is not binding law.” Likewise, in her concurrence in Vidal v. Elster, a free-speech case involving trademarks, she rejected a sole reliance on the existence of a “common-law tradition” or a “historical analogue.” “The views of preceding generations can persuade, and, in the realm of stare decisis, even bind,” she opined. “But tradition is not an end in itself.”
In his Rahimi concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh added that traditional practice also plays a role to the degree that constitutional language is vague or uncertain at the margin. He then described in some detail “how courts apply pre-ratification history, post-ratification history, and precedent when analyzing vague constitutional text.”
The biggest challenge to restoring the original meaning of the text are stare decisis, the doctrine by which justices are bound by precedent, and the fear that adopting original meaning would require wholesale disruption of existing programs and institutions. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo—the case that overturned Chevron, which required judges to defer to bureaucrats’ interpretations of ambiguous statutes—provided promising answers to each concern.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Gorsuch limited the scope of stare decisis: “When judges reach a decision in our adversarial system, they render a judgment based only on the factual record and legal arguments the parties at hand have chosen to develop. A later court assessing a past decision must therefore appreciate the possibility that different facts and different legal arguments may dictate a different outcome.” According to this approach, precedents in which originalist arguments weren’t presented don’t bar the court from adopting originalist arguments to reach a different result.
But this limitation of stare decisis needs to be combined with a point Chief Justice Roberts made in the majority opinion: “We do not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful—including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself—are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology.” This principle allows original meaning to be applied prospectively rather than retrospectively, leaving existing programs in place and thus avoiding a disruptive originalist “big bang.”
Had you told me when I was a law student reading Warren and Burger Court “living constitutionalist” opinions that there would be Supreme Court opinions like these in my lifetime, I would have asked what you were smoking. The originalists on the court don’t always agree on what originalism requires. But they are feeling their way through this thicket, case by case. In the process, they are educating each other and the non-originalist justices, and engaging in a dialogue with legal academics as well as with the American public.
Mr. Barnett teaches constitutional law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he directs the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. He is author of “A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist.”
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Biden’s Frailty and the Political Price of Insincerity
When people said he seemed unwell, Democrats called it a Republican ploy. That was a costly mistake.
By Barton Swaim
The question remains unanswered: How did they let it get this far? How did Democratic power brokers and progressive media personalities—groups not known for their indifference to winning elections—wait until July 2024 to urge President Biden not to run for re-election?
Any mildly observant person could see four years ago that Mr. Biden had declined further than a commander in chief should. These pages noted Mr. Biden’s diminished state during and after his 2020 campaign. In the 2012 debate with Paul Ryan, the editorial board remarked on Nov. 19, 2020, Mr. Biden “was aggressive and confident. In 2020, in the rare times he speaks off the cuff without a teleprompter, he looks more tentative, as if grasping for an argument or words that he knows are around here somewhere.”
Democrats disregarded this and 10,000 similar observations because they took them to be insincere, and the political left has become so accustomed to insincerity as not to recognize its opposite. On the left—particularly in the New York Times and other elite outlets—substantive complaints are routinely presented as procedural or ethical ones. Rather than make a straightforward argument that a person or policy is wrong on the merits, elected Democrats, following the media’s lead, typically raise technical or otherwise secondary objections they plainly don’t care about.
Any time a Republican president nominates a judge to the Supreme Court, Democrats can be counted on to fly quickly past the substantive reasons for their opposition and invent ethical lapses that, even if true, wouldn’t bother them in any other situation. No Senate Democrat cared if Brett Kavanaugh behaved badly at some unspecified time and place in the 1980s. They wanted him defeated.
Other defamatory inventions—against Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, among others—aren’t worth repeating because Democrats themselves didn’t care enough to believe or disbelieve them.
Last month the Times published a report claiming that Judge Aileen Cannon, assigned to adjudicate Mr. Trump’s classified documents case, had been advised to stand down by “two more experienced colleagues on the federal bench.” Judge Cannon hadn’t bowed to every Democratic demand in the Trump documents case, so she had to go. Progressive pundits dropped their feminist sensibilities and simply talked down to her. “Girl, stay in your lane,” legal analyst Melissa Murray advised Judge Cannon on MSNBC.
None of these talking heads cared a whit about judicial experience. They wanted Judge Cannon gone. The process argument was, as ever, a means to an end.
Did any earnest progressive journalist care, as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg pretended to care, that Donald Trump once “falsified business records” in furtherance of an unnamed second crime? Of course not. Mr. Trump’s business records were irrelevant to Mr. Bragg and his defenders. What they cared about was convicting him of a felony. Any felony.
Progressives in the Washington Post newsroom pretended to care that Will Lewis, the publisher brought on to turn the Post’s failing finances around, had once been connected to a phone-hacking scandal in the U.K. None of these newsroom activists cared the first thing about the “scandal” to which they wanted to attach Mr. Lewis. They wanted him fired.
Our pundit class and Democratic officeholders appear to believe that everyone else in the political realm thinks the way they do. Most don’t. When right-leaning commentators pointed out that Mr. Biden appeared weak and confused, they did so because Mr. Biden appeared weak and confused. Democrats evidently thought Republicans were making it up and only wanted to get rid of Mr. Biden. A week before the debate that forced Democrats to acknowledge the reality of Mr. Biden’s condition, the Times ran a long and amply illustrated article about how Republicans and “conservative news outlets” had circulated videos of the president that “lacked important context” in order to portray him as old and feeble. The writers of this risible work of advocacy might have reflected that Republicans had every reason for wishing Mr. Biden to remain on the ticket.
Having convinced themselves that the president’s infirmity was a right-wing invention, Democrats find themselves in the unenviable position of having to acknowledge the truth of what their opponents have been saying for years. The whole mess might have been avoided if Democrats had credited their critics with sincerity.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Journal.
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Where’s the Report to Congress on Iran’s Nuclear Program?
The White House has missed legal deadlines for more than a year.
By The Editorial Board
President Biden says Donald Trump is a lawbreaker, but his Administration is hardly any better. A case in point is its failure to file a report to Congress required by law on the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Sen. Lindsey Graham helped to write Public Law 117-263, Section 5593 of the Iran Nuclear Weapons Capability and Terrorism Monitoring Act of 2022. It requires the Administration to send Congress an assessment every six months about Iran’s progress on uranium enrichment and other nuclear weapons development.
Mr. Graham has been asking the White House for weeks about the report, and he’s finally lost patience. In a letter Wednesday to Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, the Senator said the Administration is “in violation of the law” for “missing two Section 5593 assessment deadlines over the past year and failing to submit Section 7413 assessments” when Iran reaches a major enrichment threshold.
He said he’ll put a hold on DNI nominations, and he’ll work with colleagues to condition funding for DNI headquarters, until the reports are sent to Capitol Hill.
There’s good reason to be worried. The board of the International Atomic Energy Agency recently censured Iran for failing to cooperate with the United Nations nuclear watchdog and escalating its uranium enrichment. Mr. Graham’s letter cites the agency as saying Iran has increased its stockpile of enriched fuel up to 60% purity to 313.3 pounds as of May this year.
As Mr. Graham’s letter points out, this is only “a small technical step away from weapons grade 90% purity” and that much closer to being able to stage a bomb breakout. Israeli officials are expressing their growing alarm in private conversations with U.S. officials. They’re concerned enough that talk of some military operation, long dormant, is back on the table.
Iran’s progress may be a reason for the failure of Ms. Haines’s office to provide the information to Congress. If it tells the truth about the program, members of both parties would increase the political pressure to do something. Yet the White House has been striving mightily not to say or do anything regarding Iran that could lead to more tension before the November election.
News reports have said the U.S. opposed the IAEA’s censure before finally going along with the Europeans. The White House has also failed to help the public understand Iran’s role as the head of the terrorist hydra of proxy militias behind the war in Gaza, Houthi attacks on commercial shipping, and attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, Syria and Jordan.
An Iranian government with a nuclear weapon would make all of these threats exponentially more dangerous. It is therefore “unacceptable,” as Mr. Graham puts it, that the Administration isn’t providing “an updated assessment that outlines the exact status” of Iran’s nuclear program.
Anonymous intelligence sources somehow found it important to leak to the press this week that Russia wants Donald Trump to win the presidential election. After the fiascoes of 2016 and 2020, there’s no reason to believe anything the intelligence services say about the presidential race. But the least the Biden spooks can do is follow the law and be honest with Congress about Iran’s nuclear threat.
Correction: This editorial was changed to correct a detail in the IAEA’s assessment of Iran’s stockpile of enriched fuel based on updated and corrected information from the Senator’s office.
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