A businessman who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, Vivek Ramaswamy, says he will lay out a “legal and constitutional basis” for shutting down federal agencies with executive power during a speech Wednesday at the America First Policy Institute at Washington, D.C.
Shutting down the Department of Education has long been a Republican talking point, but Mr. Ramaswamy and much of the New Right — a constellation of mostly young thinkers and activists unburdened by conservative orthodoxy — want to go further, promising to shut down a host of alphabet agencies, like the FBI, the IRS, and the ATF. Mr. Ramaswamy says if elected president, he will reduce the workforce of the federal bureaucracy “swamp” by 75 percent.
Mr. Ramaswamy calls the unelected bureaucrats at Washington “collecting a paycheck from taxpayers” through Republican and Democrat administrations the “fourth branch of government” — and he wants it gone. His pledge sounds a lot like President Trump’s 2016 “drain the swamp” campaign promise, but Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch is that he is the smart, adept one who can actually get it done.
“They duped presidents from Reagan to Trump by telling them they couldn’t do it. And on solid legal authority we are, on Wednesday, going to lay out exactly how we will get that done in a way that goes far beyond any historical GOP talking points,” Mr. Ramaswamy told reporters Sunday at an event at New Hampshire. “It takes the America First movement to the next level.”
At a barbecue at New Hampshire Sunday hosted by a cryptocurrency millionaire and former Republican U.S. Senate candidate, Bruce Fenton, Mr. Ramaswamy articulated his vision in revolutionary terms. The tables were adorned with Gadsden flags, tricorn hats, and faux-aged copies of the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Fenton is part of the Free State Project, a movement to get “liberty lovers” to move to New Hampshire, influence state politics, and create a libertarian homeland.
“Do you want incremental reform, or do you want revolution?” Mr. Ramaswamy asked the crowd of about 150 people. “I think that’s the real choice we face in the GOP primary.”
A 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur, Mr. Ramaswamy favors revolution, and the crowd ate it up. He painted a dark vision of the state of the country, saying that Americans are “starved for purpose and meaning and identity.”
“At a time in our national history, with the things that used to fill the void — faith, patriotism, hard work, family — these things have disappeared,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. “And when you have a black hole in your heart that runs that deep, that is when the poison fills the void: woke-ism, transgenderism, climate-ism, Covid-ism, globalism. As I sometimes joke around now, Zelensky-ism.”
This “American carnage” articulation recalls Mr. Trump and runs in direct contrast to the Reaganite optimism of Republican presidential candidates such as Ambassador Nikki Haley and Vice President Pence. “We’re not looking for a new national identity,” Mr. Pence argued with Mr. Ramaswamy at the Republican presidential debate. “The American people are the most faith-filled, freedom-loving, idealistic, hard-working people the world has ever known.”
“It’s not morning in America,” Mr. Ramaswamy shot back.
Mr. Ramaswamy’s opposition to funding the war in Ukraine is another point of departure from traditional Republicanism. These divisions reflect a larger split within the conservative movement between the Nikki Haleys of the world and the younger, über-online right that is attracted to Messrs. Ramaswamy and DeSantis and their scorched-earth vision of dismantling the administrative state, or as Mr. DeSantis said last month, when referring to reducing the federal workforce, “slitting throats on day one.”
Mr. Ramaswamy says he used to identify as libertarian and didn’t vote in his 20s because he was “jaded.” His message about shutting down government agencies, pardoning Julian Assange of Wikileaks, and freeing the founder of the dark web drug sales site Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, has earned him praise from many of the young, online right.
Several libertarian-leaning guests on Tim Pool’s YouTube show recently praised Mr. Ramaswamy for these promises. Mr. Ramaswamy is making the rounds of podcasts, YouTube shows, and other new media to attract this younger “jaded” crowd.
Mr. Ramaswamy shares the techno-libertarian origins of many in the New Right, and his diagnosis of America’s maladies aligns him with the Curtis Yarvin “democracy has failed” acolytes and “national divorce” proponents like the Libertarian Party, but his prescription is more optimistic and grounded in a unified constitutional republic. Mr. Ramaswamy opposes national divorce, embraces “one person, one vote,” and calls this a “1776 moment.”
Yet he also throws red meat to this crowd, imagining himself as a more capable Mr. Trump, the embodiment of “America First 2.0” that can successfully knee-cap birthright citizenship for offspring of illegal immigrants, secure the southern border, and speak “truth” — Mr. Ramaswamy’s campaign slogan — on culture war issues. The campaign posted signs around the Fenton property that articulated these so-called truths according to Ramaswamy: “Reverse racism is racism,” “There are two genders,” and, “Human flourishing requires fossil fuels.”
“We have to speak truth,” Mr. Fenton tells the Sun. “I have definitely been talking to a lot of liberty people and Free Staters about why I think Vivek is the guy.”
Mr. Trump is leading in Republican polls by large margins, but Mr. Ramaswamy’s rise indicates there is a hunger for this direct, “revolutionary” messaging. The main stalwarts of libertarianism, like Reason Magazine, may not be endorsing Mr. Ramaswamy’s agenda, which deviates significantly from libertarian orthodoxy, but a significant portion of the online New Right is.
Mr. Ramaswamy says the drive among Republicans to compromise in their beliefs is misguided. “I reject ‘show up in the middle and compromise,’ hold hands, sing Kumbaya,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. “We’re not going to tinker around the edges, we’re going to get in there and shut it down. That’s how you revive a constitutional republic.”
Former Mossad Chief, Yossi Cohen, said if Israel wants to continue its war in Gaza, it must listen to the United States and ensure the entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged Strip.
Cohen added that he has always opposed transferring money to the Gaza Strip, and that Israel now needs to build an “Arab coalition” to manage Gaza’s affairs after the end of the war.
“This aid should not be unlimited. We have to set conditions, as the entire sector has brought the disaster upon itself,” he added.
Hamas, he added, has been preparing for this war for years and the tunnels in Gaza “are much more” than hundreds of kilometres long, “but an underground city, with deep and long bunkers, with a logistical arrangement that allows for greater underground life than we thought.”
“We fight at the top and they stay at the bottom,” he added.
Cohen said he opposes a ceasefire in Gaza, stressing that the only way to reach a deal to free the prisoners of war is to continue the war effort.
Once the war is over, Cohen said: “We have to deal with it [Gaza] and say what we want to happen next. We have to build something for which the State of Israel is not completely responsible.”
“We need to build some kind of Arab coalition and then a broader international coalition, which will take responsibility, as they did with refugee countries and other war zones,” he added.
“Let us sit in the same room with the United States, Japan, India, China, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and others, and we say to them: Dear friends, we announce that we will separate from this region, and this time seriously.”
This week the FBI took the unprecedented step of executing a search warrant on the Mar-a-Lago home of former President Donald Trump. No former president has ever been the subject of such an investigative practice. In response, chief Trump supporter and MAGA cheerleader Marjorie Taylor Greene expressed outrage at the FBI’s actions by tweeting, “DEFUND THE FBI!” Far right Rep. Paul Gosar hit similar notes, tweeting, “We must destroy the FBI. We must save America.” While this about-face on “Back the Blue” is an amusing example of the right-wing ideological confusion that ensues when lawmakers adhere to diehard Trump loyalism, we on the left should use this moment as an opportunity to explore a plan to actually do that. The FBI should indeed be defunded — though the reasons for that have nothing to do with the fact that the agency searched Donald Trump’s home.
The January 6 attack on the Capitol showed us the deep fissures in the Back the Blue concept trotted out by the right in response to the Black Lives Matter protests of recent years. While conservatives claim to support the police, they do so on a very narrow basis. Police authority is desirable to them only as long as it is solely directed at what they perceive to be suspect classes, including poor people, BIPOC communities, trans people, immigrants, anti-fascists, sex workers, and other marginalized groups. Built into right-wing support for the police is an understanding — grounded in history — that police authority should not be exercised against the powerful classes, including the wealthy, the politically dominant — and white nationalists. This understanding is why many on the right do not view images of “Back the Blue” proponents beating Capitol police with their Trump flags as hypocritical.
This seeming contradiction helps us get to a deeper truth about the nature of police power. The FBI in particular, and the police in general, were not created to provide justice. Instead, the history of the FBI is one of repressing movements for liberation and carrying out wars on marginalized communities in the guise of wars on drugs, crime, terrorism, gangs and communism, among other phenomena determined by the state to be threats. The FBI’s long-running stretches of state-sanctioned violence have served to criminalize those that challenge the status quo, either through organized resistance or through survival strategies that interfere with capitalist notions of protecting the private property and individual autonomy of the rich and powerful.
The precursor to the FBI, the Bureau of Investigation, was created in 1908 in large part to investigate political threats to the power of the robber barons. These threats included striking workers, anarchists and communists. Driven initially by fears of communist revolution following the Russian Revolution and then the massive strikes and labor militancy of the 1930s, the Bureau of Investigation became the primary federal tool for surveilling and subverting left organizing. It was taken over by J. Edgar Hoover in 1924 and transformed into the FBI in 1934, when it became a massive domestic intelligence-gathering operation with files on millions of Americans including politicians, celebrities, labor leaders, journalists, religious figures, and anyone suspected of subversive leanings, many of whom were people of color, Jews, and other members of historically oppressed communities. Tim Weiner, in his book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, meticulously documents the political origins of the FBI and its dirty tricks.
In the 1960s, Hoover identified a new subversive threat: the civil rights movement. The Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), was an FBI-created program that spied on and undermined both socialist leaders and civil rights movement leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., and helped coordinate local attacks on the Black Panthers, the Socialist Workers Party, and many other groups. FBI agents attended activist groups’ meetings, openly photographed license plates of attendees, wiretapped phones, sent fake correspondences, and used informants to plant false rumors about marital infidelities and police cooperation to sow fear and dissension. The FBI was directly involved with local officials in Chicago who conspired to assassinate Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.
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White supremacy continues to be the greatest domestic threat, but the FBI is more interested in its own fantasies.
The history of the FBI is one of repressing movements for liberation and carrying out wars on marginalized communities.
The FBI has long been a tool of political subversion used to suppress threats to the status quo. But, in contrast to the claims of Trump loyalists, the focus of the FBI’s attacks has rarely been the right-wing extremists that now dominate much of the Republican Party. In his book Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide, former FBI agent Michael German points out how federal law enforcement has largely ignored or excused right-wing violence, leaving a focus on Muslim immigrants, environmental activists and the Movement for Black Lives, among other marginalized groups.
Given this history of politically motivated repression, it should be the left calling for defunding and defanging the FBI. Here is a concrete program to begin that process:
1) End the FBI’s role in political policing. The FBI should be forced to shut down the intelligence-gathering activities that make possible the subversion tactics at the center of the agency’s history. Following the revelations of COINTELPRO in the 1970s, the Church Committee attempted this through the power of congressional oversight, but many of the FBI’s harmful practices remained, although they were better hidden from view and protected by language intended to restrict — but not eliminate — their activities.
2) End the FBI’s role in the “war on terror.” One of the primary tools in waging this war has been the entrapment of people who are lured into fantastical plots invented by FBI agents so that they can be arrested for planning actions they had no intention or ability to ever complete. The goal of these operations, such as the targeting of an intellectually disabled man in New York who was lured into a FBI-created plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station, seem designed to give the FBI the appearance of winning — to garner support for counterterrorism funding for the agency. We should also dismantle fusion centers and Joint Terrorism Task Forces. As Brendan McQuade documents in Pacifying the Homeland, these efforts have had little to do with protecting us from actual violence. Instead, they have morphed into all-purpose “predictive” policing operations that spend much of their time preparing threat assessments for local police and private business interests that both exaggerate the threat of politically motivated violence and use complex algorithms to justify intensive and invasive policing of poor and BIPOC communities.
3) End the FBI’s role in the “war on drugs.” The war on drugs has been an unmitigated failure, if your metric of success is saving lives and improving community safety. If, however, your metric of success is one of criminalizing political enemies and violently targeting the poor and people of color, then the mission has certainly been accomplished. The federal prohibition on many drugs has been a major driver of mass incarceration, the criminalization of non-white communities and the overdose crisis. Susan Phillips’s Operation Flytrap shows how the eponymously named FBI anti-drug sting did nothing to end the flow of drugs into Los Angeles, and instead pointlessly criminalized the most vulnerable people in a community hard hit by poverty, unemployment, and public and private sector disinvestment. In addition, we should abolish the Drug Enforcement Agency, and use the savings to invest in police-free harm reduction projects, high-quality and noncoercive drug treatment, and targeted economic development programs.
4) End the FBI’s role in so-called violence reduction. Presidents have repeatedly used the FBI as a political tool for looking “tough on crime.” “Gang takedowns” and special initiatives have been created to give the appearance of federal action to tackle crime, but have little to show for themselves other than police-perpetrated abuse and mass incarceration. For years the FBI has been using RICO conspiracy laws to target youth violence. As The Policing and Social Justice Project documented in New York City, these takedowns ensnare large numbers of young people based on their associations, rather than direct involvement in violence. City University of New York law professor Babe Howell showed that in one such mass arrest of 120 young people, half of those charged were simply accused of drug-related offenses, despite being called the “worst of the worst” and held without bail for up to two years awaiting dispositions. (However, even if they had been accused of actual violence, there would be no justification for treating them in this way.) Instead of pouring money into “anti-violence” initiatives that are themselves purveyors of violence, we should be looking to community-driven solutions. The New York City G.A.N.G.S. Coalition and others around the U.S. have called instead for investments in community-based anti-violence initiatives and reinvestments in communities devastated by deindustrialization, redlining and austerity.
Federal law enforcement has largely ignored or excused right-wing violence.
In 2019, Donald Trump laid out his plan to use the FBI to help with his reelection effort, called Operation Relentless Pursuit. He targeted seven cities run by Democratic mayors to receive infusions of federal agents and money for more local police to engage in intensive policing of “high crime” communities, backed up by intensive federal prosecutions. Local activists in the targeted cities of Memphis, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Baltimore and Albuquerque mobilized against local cooperation with this initiative citing the lack of federal accountability and the need for community investments, not more policing.
These four steps would dramatically shrink the scope and power of the FBI and pave the way toward abolishing an agency that has not provided real justice or protection for large segments of U.S. society. As right-wingers make a bizarre and twisted case for defunding the FBI, we on the left need to make our own case for defunding the FBI’s intrusive and illegitimate political policing. Then we must go further and question the basic function of federal law enforcement in propping up a system of profound inequality, injustice and state violence.
For 22 years, Truthout has been a platform for new and daring ideas, uplifting voices and producing trailblazing, award-winning journalism. The stories we’ve published over the last two decades have been read by tens of millions of people and inspired the conversations and actions that are necessary for social change.
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Veteran singer-songwriter Bob Dylan is currently promoting his album Rough and Rowdy Ways, with the epic song “Murder Most Foul” — a deconstruction of the John F. Kennedy assassination and the larger 1960s, full of paranoia, intimations of conspiracy and foreboding. While the song reconstructs the world of the ‘60s, it is also, with its allusions to sinister forces at play, very much a song of the moment. The irony in all this, however, is that documents buried in the archives recently discovered by this author detail how Dylan himself was a target of a secret government program during that period.
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. On December 13 that year, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC) — an advocacy group for constitutional rights, with considerable Communist Party influence — held its annual Bill of Rights Dinner. The event aimed to honor people it considered at the forefront of the fight for civil liberties. One of those up for an award was Bob Dylan.
Dylan, who had been drinking freely throughout the evening, was not employing the most diplomatic behavior. When he rose to accept the honor, he proceeded to give a rambling speech, where among other things, he opined on the assassination — a matter still white-hot in most people’s thinking:
I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where — what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I too — I saw some of myself in him. I don’t think it would have gone — I don’t think it could go that far. But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt, in me — not to go that far and shoot.
While much of the audience responded to Dylan’s remarks with boos and hisses, FBI informants — there were at least five in the audience — were taking notes. Based on these, an internal memo claimed Dylan had said, “He would not go that far, but he is not sure.” Later reports, such as those in his girlfriend Suze Rotolo’s Bureau file, would omit the provocative phrase “but he is not sure.” The initial report, however, went into and would remain in the FBI’s records.
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Rotolo’s FBI file is a reminder that the greatest threat to freedom is the agency tasked with protecting it.
Dylan would walk back his comments to a degree, issuing a statement saying, among other things, “when I spoke of Lee Oswald, I was speakin of the times I was not speakin of his deed if it was his deed the deed speaks for itself.” But it did not stop the fallout. We now know the FBI quickly crafted a plan for using the remarks against Dylan and the ECLC. These revelations come via memos buried in the voluminous, and largely unexamined, files of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) aimed at the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA).
In the wake of the dinner, the New York FBI sent a memo, dated December 16, 1963, to J. Edgar Hoover recounting the particulars of the incident. In it, agents wrote, “The statement in the letterhead memorandum made by Dylan pertaining to the assassination of President KENNEDY has been furnished to the Secret Service in New York City.” However, in another memo a week later, they made clear they were not limiting things to the Secret Service:
The above statement of Dylan’s [on Oswald] was furnished to the Secret Service in New York City by the New York Office (NYO). At the Seat of Government [Washington DC] we disseminated copies of the memorandum concerning the meeting, including Dylan’s statement, to Secret Service, Assistant Attorney General Yeagley and to the intelligence agencies of the armed services.
In this way, the FBI was not just alerting the Secret Service, but was also alerting other key federal agencies, suggesting Bob Dylan was a potential national security threat.
That same memo also laid out what the FBI knew about Dylan up to that point. In it, they report that the April 16 issue of the National Guardian — a leftist weekly — “contained an announcement regarding a ‘Folk and Jazz Concert’ to be presented on 4-25-62 by the U.S. Festival Committee. One of the individuals listed to perform at this ‘concert’ was Bob Dylan.” The scare quotes around the word “concert” suggesting ulterior aims.
That same report notes Dylan’s aborted appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” citing a New York Times article from May 14, 1963. Dylan had been scheduled to appear on the show and planned to perform the song, “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” which ridiculed that right-wing organization. However, the producers told him after the rehearsal that he could not play the song because it was “controversial.” That incident in turn led CBS — which owned Dylan’s label, Columbia Records — to remove the song from Dylan’s forthcoming Freewheelin’ album.
The Bureau, however, was not content to just write memos. The incident occurred at a time when the FBI was undertaking an aggressive campaign to disrupt the Communist Party through COINTELPRO. In the FBI’s view, the CPUSA was in disarray in the aftermath of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Joseph Stalin in 1956. As such, the Bureau assessed that the situation was “made to order for an all-out disruptive attack against the [Communist Party] from within.” What followed was an extensive campaign to disrupt the group by spreading rumors, sending out poison pen letters, planting stories in the press, and other secret measures. In that regard, they saw Dylan’s speech as an opportunity:
Under the Counterintelligence Program, it is urged that this statement of BOB DYLAN, made at this meeting, be brought to the attention of all the Bureau’s contacts in the mass media field so that proper publicity will be given to DYLAN, who by means of his folk singing, has the ability to have some communication with American youth. In addition, publicity of this sort will point up the type of organization the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee is to honor an individual of Dylan’s mentality.
The contempt exhibited for Dylan in this is palpable.
Two weeks later, a piece by nationally syndicated columnist Fulton Lewis Jr. was published in newspapers around the country. Lewis’s column was a detailed report of the dinner — though notably, he did not claim to be in attendance — that reads as if taken straight from the FBI’s files. For example, he notes the attendance of Robert Thompson, a “top-ranking Communist official once convicted of violating the Smith Act, and Harvey O’Connor, the oft-identified Communist.”
The column also disparages James Baldwin — honored at the event alongside Dylan — as a “liberal egghead,” before turning to the musician:
The ECRC Tom Paine Award went to folksinger Bob Dylan, who wore dirty chinos and a worn-out shirt. He accepted the award “on behalf of all those who went to Cuba because they’re young and I’m young and I’m proud of it.” He went on to say that he saw part of Lee Harvey Oswald “in myself.”
It is not surprising that Lewis would have such information. He was one of the media sources considered to be among the FBI’s “press contacts.” He was also considered to be an ally of the Bureau and its longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover. This closeness can be seen in a letter from Hoover, obtained via a FOIA request by this author, to Lewis’s successor after Lewis died in 1966. While the addressee of the letter is redacted, a typed “Note” on the bottom reads “Fulton Lewis, Jr., was a good friend to the Bureau and the Director.”
How all this ultimately impacted the ECLC and the CPUSA is unclear — it was but one among a barrage of efforts by the Bureau. With Dylan, however, it offers another piece in the puzzle of the attention and repression aimed at him during his most overtly political period, when he wrote such songs as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Not only had he been prohibited from singing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” on “The Ed Sullivan Show” that May, two weeks before the ECLC dinner, there was a hit piece on Dylan inNewsweek. The piece, along with ridiculing his singing, claimed a New Jersey high school student — not Dylan — wrote the song “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Notably, those attacks were conducted more or less in the open. The FBI, however, was operating in the shadows.
The pushback on Dylan happened amid the Cold War contention between the now long-gone U.S.S.R. and the U.S. While that was a time with its own peculiar forms of repression, the impulse has not disappeared. Putting aside for the moment the fascistic politics percolating across the U.S., one need look no further than the current calls and actions to suppress those standing with the people of Gaza to see how fraught the current landscape is. If the Bob Dylan of today is writing songs about a dark turn of events in the U.S. — or as Dylan writes in “Murder Most Foul,” the place where faith, hope and charity die — he is only expanding on a narrative that has been in play for a considerable amount of time.
For 22 years, Truthout has been a platform for new and daring ideas, uplifting voices and producing trailblazing, award-winning journalism. The stories we’ve published over the last two decades have been read by tens of millions of people and inspired the conversations and actions that are necessary for social change.
But to continue publishing meaningful, powerful, inspiring journalism, we still need to raise $38,000 by midnight tomorrow — and for a limited time, any donation you make will be matched, dollar for dollar.
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US Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has expressed his strong opinions about the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), Mr Ramaswamy argued that the FBI is beyond reform and should be permanently shut down. He asserted that the president has the authority to take such action and pledged to do so if elected.
Vivek Ramaswamy posted, “The FBI can’t be ‘reformed.’ The right answer is: Shut It Down. Yes, the President can do it. I will.”
The FBI can’t be “reformed.”The right answer is: Shut It Down.Yes, the President can do it.
Another one added, “I agree with your general ideas about the #FBI. However, there needs to be a real well thought out replacement/ transition plan. You can’t just waive your magic wand. There are important existing operations going on. Granularity is required. A well thought out plan is needed,”
I agree with your general ideas about the #FBI. However, their needs to be a real well thought out replacement/ transition plan. You cant just waive your magic wand. There are important existing operations going on. Granularity is required. A well thought out plan is needed
“Wow. That’s quite a statement. Is the corruption within the FBI of such a kind that there’s no way to clean up the house but only one option = shut it down?” read a comment.
Wow. That’s quite a statement Vivek. Is the corruption within the FBI of such a kind that there’s no way to clean up the house but only one option = shut it down? ????
This is not the first time Vivek Ramaswamy has shared a strong opinion about the FBI. Earlier, he had said that fire over 75 per cent of the federal workforce and shutter several major agencies if he is elected the US President, the New York Times reported.
Mr Ramaswamy had said that he would disband the “Department of Education, the FBI, the Food and Nutrition Service, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives,” the report added.
Meanwhile, Vivek Ramaswamy has also urged his party leaders to avoid taking part in primary elections that exclude Donald Trump from the ballot. This request comes after Colorado decided not to include Mr Trump in their state polls.
Now California is trying to remove Trump from ballot, citing Colorado.
DeSantis, Haley, & Christie should join me in pledging to withdraw from the primary in *any* state that removes Trump from ballot. That’s the only way to stop blatant election interference in the GOP primary. https://t.co/5xvuLWRWGD
On December 20, the Colorado Supreme Court said Donal Trump is “disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
A Times investigation found that troops were disorganized, out of position and relied on social media to choose targets. Behind the failure: Israel had no battle plan for a massive Hamas invasion.
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Far beneath the Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv, in a bunker known as The Pit, commanders were trying to make sense of reports of Hamas rocket fire in southern Israel early on the morning of Oct. 7, when the call came in.
It was a commander from the division that oversees military operations along the border with Gaza. Their base was under attack. The commander could not describe the scope of the attack or provide more details, according to a military official with knowledge of the call. But he asked that all available reinforcements be sent.
At 7:43 a.m., more than an hour after the rocket assault began and thousands of Hamas fighters stormed into Israel, The Pit issued its first deployment instructions of the day. It ordered all emergency forces to head south, along with all available units that could do so quickly.
But the nation’s military leaders did not yet recognize that an invasion of Israel was already well underway.
Hours later, desperate Israeli citizens were still fending for themselves and calling for help. Roughly 1,200 people died as the Middle East’s most advanced military failed in its essential mission: protecting Israeli lives.
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Civilians killed by Palestinian militants lay covered in Sderot, Israel, on Oct. 7.Credit…Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press
The full reasons behind the military’s slow response may take months to understand. The government has promised an inquiry. But a New York Times investigation found that Israel’s military was undermanned, out of position and so poorly organized that soldiers communicated in impromptu WhatsApp groups and relied on social media posts for targeting information. Commandos rushed into battle armed only for brief combat. Helicopter pilots were ordered to look to news reports and Telegram channels to choose targets.
And perhaps most damning: The Israel Defense Forces did not even have a plan to respond to a large-scale Hamas attack on Israeli soil, according to current and former soldiers and officers. If such a plan existed on a shelf somewhere, the soldiers said, no one had trained on it and nobody followed it. The soldiers that day made it up as they went along.
“In practice, there wasn’t the right defensive preparation, no practice, and no equipping and building strength for such an operation,” said Yom Tov Samia, a major general in the Israeli reserves and former head of the military’s Southern Command.
“There was no defense plan for a surprise attack such as the kind we have seen on Oct. 7,” said Amir Avivi, a brigadier general in the reserves and a former deputy commander of the Gaza Division, which is responsible for protecting the region.
That lack of preparation is at odds with a founding principle of Israeli military doctrine. From the days of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, the goal was to always be on the offensive — to anticipate attacks and fight battles in enemy territory.
In response to a series of questions from The Times, including why soldiers and officers alike said there had been no plan, the Israel Defense Forces replied: “The I.D.F. is currently focused on eliminating the threat from the terrorist organization Hamas. Questions of this kind will be looked into at a later stage.”
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Israeli soldiers in Sderot on Oct. 7.Credit…Tsafrir Abayov/Associated Press
The Times investigation is based on internal Israeli government documents and a review of the military’s cache of materials, known as Pandora, that contains tens of thousands of videos, including footage from body cameras worn by terrorists and closed-circuit surveillance cameras. The Times interviewed dozens of officers, enlisted troops and eyewitnesses, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about military operations.
The documents and interviews revealed new details about the attack, including military assessments and orders like the one given by The Pit early that morning. Taken together, they show that much of the military failure was due to the lack of a plan, coupled with a series of intelligence missteps in the months and years before the attack.
Israeli security and military agencies produced repeated assessments that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of launching a massive invasion. The authorities clung to that optimistic view even when Israel obtained Hamas battle plans that revealed an invasion was precisely what Hamas was planning.
The decisions, in retrospect, are tinged with hubris. The notion that Hamas could execute an ambitious attack was seen as so unlikely that Israeli intelligence officials even reduced eavesdropping on Hamas radio traffic, concluding that it was a waste of time.
None of the officers interviewed, including those stationed along the border, could recall discussions or training based on a plan to repel such an assault.
“As far as I recall, there was no such plan,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli general and a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The army does not prepare itself for things it thinks are impossible.”
Image
Hamas teams breached the Israel-Gaza border fence in dozens of locations.Credit…Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa/Reuters
The Israeli government had determined that the loosely organized civilian guard, known as Kitat Konnenut, would serve as the first line of defense in the towns and villages near the border. But the guardsmen had different standards of training depending on who was in charge. For years, they warned that some of their units were poorly trained and underequipped, according to two Israeli military officials with direct knowledge of the volunteer teams.
Additionally, the Israeli military reservists were not prepared to quickly mobilize and deploy. Some described heading south on their own initiative.
Davidi Ben Zion, 38, a major in the reserves, said reservists never trained to respond at a moment’s notice to an invasion. The training assumed that Israeli intelligence would learn of a looming invasion in advance, giving reservists time to prepare to deploy.
“The procedure states that we have the battalion ready for combat in 24 hours,” he said. “There’s a checklist to authorize the distribution of everything. We practiced this for many years.”
Hamas capitalized on these errors in ways that further delayed the Israeli response. Terrorists blocked key highway intersections, leaving soldiers bogged down in firefights as they tried to enter besieged towns. And the Hamas siege on the military base in southern Israel crippled the regional command post, paralyzing the military response.
Much remains unknown about that day, including what orders were given inside Israel’s senior military leadership in Tel Aviv, and when. The Times investigation builds on and adds new details to aggressive coverage in the Israeli media of the military response.
Officers and reservists who headed south that morning, whether under orders or on their own, soon learned of the chaos that they were entering.
Gen. Barak Hiram, who was scheduled to soon take over command of a division along the Gaza border, drove south to see firsthand how the soldiers there responded to what seemed like a routine Hamas attack.
In an interview, he recalled the text messages he received from soldiers he knew in the region.
“Come save us.”
“Send the army, quickly, they are killing us.”
“Sorry we’re turning to you, we’re already out of weapons.”
Commando units were among the first to mobilize that morning. Some said they rushed into the fight after receiving messages pleading for help or learning about the infiltrations from social media.
Other units were on standby and received formal activation orders.
The small size of the teams suggested that commanders fundamentally misunderstood the threat. Troops rolled out with pistols and assault rifles, enough to face a band of hostage-taking terrorists, but not to go into full-scale battle.
Previously undisclosed documents reviewed by The Times show just how drastically the military misread the situation. Records from early in the day show that, even during the attack, the military still assessed that Hamas, at best, would be able to breach Israel’s border fence in just a few places. A separate intelligence document, prepared weeks later, shows that Hamas teams actually breached the fence in more than 30 locations and quickly moved deep into southern Israel.
Hamas fighters poured into Israel with heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, land mines and more. They were prepared to fight for days. Israeli commandos apparently believed they would be fighting for just hours; one said he set out that morning without his night-vision goggles.
“The terrorists had a distinct tactical advantage in firepower,” said Yair Ansbacher, 40, a reservist in a counterterrorism unit who fought on Oct. 7. He and his colleagues mainly used pistols, assault rifles and sometimes sniper rifles, he said.
The situation was so dire that at 9 a.m., the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, issued a rare order. He told all combat-trained, weapons-carrying employees to go south. Shin Bet does not normally activate with the military. Ten Shin Bet operatives were killed that day.
Making matters worse, the military has acknowledged that it moved two commando companies — more than 100 soldiers — to the West Bank just two days before the attack, a reflection of Israel’s mistaken belief that a Hamas attack was not an imminent threat.
That left three infantry battalions and one tank battalion along Gaza’s border. But Oct. 7 was the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, and the Sabbath. One senior military officer estimated that about half the 1,500 soldiers in the area were away. He said that another infantry battalion had been reassigned years earlier after Israel finished building a security wall around Gaza.
Whether Hamas knew that the military was understaffed is unclear, but it had fatal consequences. When the attacks began, many soldiers were fighting for their lives instead of protecting residents nearby. Hamas stormed one base, Nahal Oz, forcing soldiers to abandon it and leave behind dead friends.
And just as the civilian volunteers had warned, the first line of defense inside Israel was quickly overwhelmed. Some units barely had enough weapons for an hourslong battle, officials said.
Hamas also worked strategically to weaken Israel’s advantage in firepower. Terrorists targeted Israeli tanks, hitting several of them, said Brig. Gen. Hisham Ibrahim, the commander of the armored corps. Tanks ran out of ammunition, leaving crews to fight with ground soldiers.
In another instance widely covered in the Israeli media, Hamas fired on an Israeli helicopter, forcing it down near Gaza. The paratroopers escaped injury before the helicopter burst into flames.
All of this should have been a clear sign that Israel was under broad attack, facing a dire situation.
But Hamas made another strategic strike that morning that all but blinded Israel’s military at a critical moment.
This group of Hamas gunmen has a clear target: a crucial military operations center.
Gaza-Israel border
Where’s the opening?
Ahmad, it’s here.
Ahmad, it’s here.
OK, go.
Come on.
Go.
Say “God is great.”
God is great.
Go.
Wait, wait.
Wait, wait, wait.
They make their way from Gaza to the Re’im army base, killing civilians in their path.
Intersection of Route 242 and Route 232
There’s someone in the car.
There’s someone in the car. There’s someone in the car.
Stop right there. Stop right there.
Salef, come shoot these.
This is the heart of all military operations along the Israel-Gaza border.
Outside Re’im base
Give it to me for a little bit.
“Calm down, man.” “Just for a minute.”
I told him to stay in [indistinct].
Someone should come with me. Someone should come with me.
As terrorists infiltrate the base, the soldiers are unable to coordinate a response across the region.
Inside Re’im base
In this room?
Go in. Go in. Go forward. Go forward.
Throw a grenade. Throw a grenade.
Give me a grenade.
Where Was the Israeli Military When Hamas Attacked? – The New York Times
The assault on the Re’im military base left soldiers there fighting for their lives rather than coordinating a response to the invasion.
Re’im is home to the Gaza Division, which oversees all military operations in the region. It is also home to two brigades, northern and southern, dedicated to protecting about 40 miles of the border.
Like other bases, Re’im was understaffed because of the holiday. A brigade commander and key staff were away from the base, according to a senior military officer. They were summoned back before dawn, officials said, as Israeli intelligence officials tried to make sense of unusual Hamas activity just over the border in Gaza.
Many soldiers, though, were allowed to keep sleeping. One told The Times that some did not know they were under attack until Hamas was in their sleeping quarters. Several were killed in their bunks. Others barricaded themselves in safe rooms.
The scope of the catastrophe, if not the attack itself, was preventable, according to records and interviews.
“After they built the fence, they put the headquarters in the middle of the sector,” said General Samia, the former head of the Southern Command. He said the three commanders of the brigades and division never should have been housed together so close to Gaza’s border.
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Gen. Yom Tov Samia in 2000.Credit…Havakuk Levison/Reuters
“In the same camp, you all had three of them — in the same location,” he said. “What a mistake. What a mistake.”
The Israeli authorities also knew, years in advance, that Hamas planned to take out Re’im as part of its invasion, documents previously obtained by The Times showed. They dismissed that plan, like the prospect of overall invasion, as implausible.
Even in May, when intelligence analysts raised alarms about Hamas training exercises, Israeli officials did not increase troop levels in the South.
The assault on Re’im led to a near blackout of communication inside the unit that coordinates troop movements across southern Israel, according to one soldier who was based there on Oct. 7.
The division that was supposed to be directing the battle was trying not to get overrun.
Even at noon, according to another Southern Command official, officers there did not understand what was happening. They assessed that Hamas had sent about 200 gunmen into Israel. They were off by a factor of 10.
It took the military most of the day to retake control of the Re’im base.
“When your division is under fire, you’re focused on clearing it from terrorists,” said General Ibrahim, the commander of the armored corps, which is based in southern Israel. “It distracts from management of the fighting more broadly.” General Ibrahim defended the military’s response, saying there are few modern armies that could have recaptured the region as quickly as Israel did.
But nobody had trained to repel an invasion.
Only a few roads connect the towns of southern Israel. Gunmen roam freely along these roadways, including Route 232 and Route 242, on the day of the attack.
Route 242
To heaven, to heaven.
[Indistinct name] will take it.
To heaven. To heaven.
To heaven [indistinct]
Our jeeps are there. Our jeeps are there.
Abu Ahmad.
Abu Ahmad. Our jeeps are there.
Abu Ahmad, our jeeps are there.
They’re descending.
Hamas gunmen terrorize motorists, opening fire on passing vehicles,
Route 242
and gather at major intersections, sowing chaos and taking control of main traffic arteries.
CCTV footage outside Sderot
The mayhem on the roads impedes a faster response by the military, and hours will pass before it establishes control of the routes.
CCTV footage from the front gate of Kibbutz Sa’ad
Where Was the Israeli Military When Hamas Attacked? – The New York Times
Hamas understood how to use Israel’s geography against its military.
Despite the siege of Re’im, reinforcements were not far away. Thousands of soldiers were less than 40 minutes from the towns that were under attack. But as terrified citizens waited in bunkers or hid from gunmen, Israeli soldiers were hung up on the highway, unable to reach them.
A central highway connects military bases in the center and south of the country to the communities near Gaza. Pockets of Hamas gunmen set up ambushes along the route, videos from Pandora show. Israeli commanders were hesitant to send soldiers into those traps, according to two Israeli military officers who took part in conversations that morning.
“Hamas is all over the roads,” one Israeli soldier reported in a conversation recounted by a participant. “They own the street, not us.”
One of the deadliest junctions was Sha’ar HaNegev, the intersection of two main arteries leading to the besieged towns and communities known as kibbutzim. Hamas seized the junction by killing motorists, setting fire to their cars and blocking roads, according to military officials and videos.
“Every encounter at the intersections resulted in the killing of the terrorists and slowing our advance,” said Mr. Ansbacher, the counterterrorism reservist, recounting the team’s frustrating progress.
“As we go along, we understand that we are really delayed. In the kibbutzim, they need us and people are getting killed.”
The elite Maglan commando unit operates out of a base about 25 minutes from Gaza.
Its deputy commander activated the unit at about 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 7, according to one officer familiar with the operations that day. But the team received little guidance from top Israeli generals or the Gaza Division headquarters, which, they did not realize, was itself under attack.
Maglan’s commandos specialized in operating behind enemy lines, where Israel always expected the fighting to occur. None of them had trained to respond to an invasion, the officer said.
The officer said there were no “concrete missions.” Soldiers were told to “just take a gun” and “save people.”
With communication out of Re’im disrupted and military leaders in Tel Aviv struggling to understand the scope of the attack, Maglan turned to an unlikely source for information: Refael Hayun, a 40-year-old who lived with his parents in Netivot, about five miles from Gaza.
Image
Refael Hayun in his bedroom in Netivot, Israel, last week.Credit…via Refael Hayun
Mr. Hayun watched Hamas videos of the attack in real time on social media and relayed information to Maglan’s officers. He began fielding WhatsApp messages from people trying to save their children, friends and themselves.
“Hi Refael, we’re stuck in a trash container near the party location,” one message read. “Please come rescue us. We’re 16 people.”
Mr. Hayun relayed those locations to the commandos, but they did not grasp the enormity of the fight. One Maglan team killed several terrorists near a base in Zikim, just north of Gaza, but they didn’t realize until 11 a.m. that Hamas fighters had stormed Kfar Aza, where some of the worst fighting took place.
Soldiers crowdsourced information. One team commander told soldiers aboard a helicopter to check Telegram channels and news reports to pick targets.
One general, a reservist who fought that day, said there were many heroes on Oct. 7. But an army only needs heroes, he said, when things have gone wrong.
Soldiers are among those asking how things went so wrong.
Major Ben Zion, the reservist, said that his paratrooper unit left its base in central Israel, not far from Tel Aviv, in a convoy at about 1:30 p.m. They mobilized on their own, without a formal call-up order. To save time, they left without night-vision equipment or adequate body armor.
He expected to see the roads packed with soldiers and equipment and armored vehicles heading south.
“The roads were empty!” he recalled in an interview. Roughly seven hours into the fighting, he turned to the reservist next to him and asked: “Where’s the I.D.F.?”
Reporting was contributed by Gal Koplewitz, Adam Sella, Aaron Boxerman, Dmitriy Khavin, Riley Mellen and Angela Rath. Produced by Alice Fang.
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House.More about Ronen Bergman
Mark Mazzetti is an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., focusing on national security, intelligence, and foreign affairs. He has written a book about the C.I.A.More about Mark Mazzetti
Ainara Tiefenthäler is a video journalist with the Visual Investigations team. She was among the recipients of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for The Times’s coverage of the vast civilian toll of U.S.-led airstrikes.More about Ainara Tiefenthäler
Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp.More about Sheera Frenkel
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 30, 2023, Section
In a new investigation by the New York Times, fresh evidence has come to light about the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, which left many killed and triggered a fresh escalation in the area.
Israeli soldiers operate at the Shajaiya district of Gaza city amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in the Gaza Strip December 8, 2023. (REUTERS)
The report exposes a massive security lapse by Israel as its troops were caught off guard when Hamas struck. When Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv, known as The Pit, received reports of Hamas rocket fire, it took more than an hour for them to issue deployment instructions. Troops were slow to respond, not fully comprehending that an invasion was already underway.
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The New York Times report further states the military was undermanned, soldiers were out of position, and communication was chaotic. They resorted to impromptu WhatsApp groups, and even social media posts were used to target information. Commandos rushed into battle without adequate preparation.
Shockingly, there was no specific plan to counter a large-scale Hamas attack. Soldiers on the ground had to improvise, contradicting the long-standing Israeli military doctrine of being on the offensive and anticipating enemy moves.
Israeli security agencies underestimated the threat, dismissing repeated assessments that Hamas was planning a massive invasion. Even when presented with Hamas battle plans, the authorities clung to an optimistic view, leading to a lack of strategic preparation.
Civilian guard and reservist issues:
The civilian guard, Kitat Konnenut, was intended as the first line of defence, but standards varied, and some units were poorly trained. Reservists were not prepared for a quick response, with some heading south on their own initiative, according to the New York Times.
Hamas strategically blocked key highway intersections, hindering the military’s mobility. The assault on the Re’im military base, a key coordination centre, left soldiers there fighting for their lives instead of managing the response.
Commando units were ill-prepared, misjudging the threat. Troops went into battle with pistols and assault rifles, expecting a limited encounter, while Hamas had heavy firepower and the intent to fight for an extended period.
Communication disruption inside the Re’im base, coupled with a lack of understanding of the situation, further hampered the military response. It took most of the day to regain control of the base.
Hamas strategically targeted key junctions, setting up ambushes along the central highway. This tactic delayed Israeli soldiers and left civilians in besieged towns waiting for help.
Soldiers, despite the chaos, showed bravery. However, the need for heroes indicates a breakdown in the military’s preparedness and response strategies.
