by Mish Shedlock, Mish Talk:
Weapons shipments that exceed a certain amount require notices to Congress. Biden’s solution is to make the shipments smaller and send hundreds more of them.
The Arms Pipeline to Israel
The Wall Street Journal notes How the U.S. Arms Pipeline to Israel Avoids Public Disclosure
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The U.S. has sent tens of thousands of weapons including bombs and precision guided munitions to Israel since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks using procedures that have largely masked the scale of the administration’s military support for its closest Middle East ally, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The administration has organized more than 100 individual transfers of arms to Israel, but has only officially notified Congress of two shipments made under the major foreign weapons sales process, which are usually submitted to lawmakers for review and then publicly disclosed, U.S. officials said. In both cases, the administration used an emergency rule that avoids the review process.
The rest of the transfers have been approved using less public mechanisms available to the White House. Those include drawing from U.S. stockpiles, accelerating previously approved deliveries and sending weapons in smaller batches that fall below a dollar threshold that requires the administration to notify Congress, according to current and former U.S. officials.
“While the State Department has no legal obligation to notify below-threshold arms transfers, using this process to repeatedly end-run Congress—as sales of this quantity suggest—would violate the spirit of the law and undermine Congress’s important oversight role” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told The Wall Street Journal.
“This stuff is non-transparent by design,” said Josh Paul, a State Department official handling congressional relations who resigned in October in protest of the Biden administration’s policy on the Gaza war.
Reflections on the Spirit of the Law
Biden openly flouts not of the spirt of laws but actual laws, and brags about that as happened with student aid.
The only people who fully understand any laws are the lobbyists who write them.
In this case the weapons industry likely lobbyists inserted provisions to allow the president to ship weapons at will.
What’s Cookin’?
The U.S.-supplied arms since the beginning of the Gaza war include at least 23,000 precision guided weapons, including Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, drones, and Joint Direct Attack Munition kits, which turn unguided bombs into “smart” bombs, along with other similar weapons, U.S. officials said.
Israel has also received 58,000 155mm artillery shells and munitions for its Iron Dome air defense system, the officials said.
Now guess what. The Pentagon will complain we don’t have enough of a weapons stockpile and will request more “defense” spending.
Republicans and Democrats will be happy to oblige.
