Last month, ProPublica released an explosive report from the award-winning investigative journalist Brett Murphy. In his exposé, Murphy revealed that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had deliberately lied to the U.S. Congress in May. This was no ordinary lie, either. As a series of emails, memos, and other documents examined by ProPublica show, Blinken had received briefings from two of the United States’ most important organizations for humanitarian aid in late April, both of which stated clearly that Israel was blocking U.S. food and medicine shipments from reaching civilians in Gaza. This is not only a war crime under international law, but it makes the United States’ continued military support for Israel illegal under domestic U.S. law as well. And so, rather than confront the reality of the situation, Blinken lied. He told Congress, even though he knew otherwise, that the aid was not being blocked. This is a grave violation of the public trust, made all the worse because it was committed in order to allow the starvation and bombing of innocent Palestinians to continue. It demonstrates that Blinken cannot be trusted to hold political power in any form. He needs to step down immediately, and if he won’t, he needs to be impeached or fired. 

Murphy’s ProPublica report is a perfect example of skeptical, adversarial journalism about a powerful U.S. leader, the kind that’s becoming all too rare.  It’s worth reading in full—if you’re prepared to be nauseated, that is. But the most important facts are these: In late April of this year, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) delivered a 17-page memo to Secretary Blinken’s desk with their assessment of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. As Murphy describes it, the memo detailed “instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.” (We can confirm most of this independently. Consider, for example, the April 1 bombing of aid workers from the nonprofit World Central Kitchen, or the extensive reports from Human Rights Watch and Refugees International on the “siege and starvation” of Gaza, or the more recent accounts from 63 medical workers who witnessed “widespread” malnutrition there.) The text of the USAID memo said that Israel was conducting “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance” and that its actions would soon lead to famine. This too was accurate, as experts at the United Nations declared a “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza on May 6.

Around the same time, multiple officials in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had an email exchange with Mira Resnick, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs, and her staff. Resnick has been criticized as a “literal arms dealer” for her commitment to providing Israel with any weapon it desires, and in April she reached out to officials in the various bureaus of the State Department, seeking their approval to transfer $827 million in military aid. As Murphy puts it in his report, this would require “All the relevant bureaus inside the State Department [...] to sign off on [the payment] and agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments.” Many of the bureau leaders did exactly that—but the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, which specializes in this subject and had the most actual knowledge of the situation on the ground, did not. Instead, an unnamed bureau official wrote in an email that “While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted.” An aide to Resnick responded, asking explicitly whether this meant U.S. military aid to Israel would be illegal. Julieta Valls Noyes, the assistant secretary for the bureau, replied that it would.

On May 10, Secretary Blinken delivered a report to Congress on the status of U.S. military aid to countries around the world. He was responding to President Biden’s National Security Memorandum 20, which instructed him to make “an assessment of any credible reports or allegations that [U.S.] defense articles and, as appropriate, defense services, have been used in a manner not consistent with international law, including international humanitarian law.” You can read a declassified version of the report here, and as an American taxpayer you really should, if only to see all the far-flung places your paycheck is sending bombs and bullets these days. (Kenya! Colombia! Bahrain! It’s like a travel brochure.) For now, the relevant part is the “Israel” section. At the time, the big headline news was that Blinken admitted the obvious about U.S. weapons, saying it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had used them unlawfully. But at the very end of the section, he also stated the following:

We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance. 

As we’ve just seen in some detail, that was a lie. At least ten days, conservatively, had passed since Blinken received the USAID report in “late April” and since the email exchange between Resnick’s staff and the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration—all of whom ultimately report to the secretary of state. Blinken knew full well the assessment that both organizations had made, along with those made independently by groups like Human Rights Watch, and he had plenty of time to include them as he prepared his report. What’s more, the U.S. military had already begun its ill-fated plan to build a temporary floating pier to deliver aid to Gaza, which would not have been necessary if Israel were not blocking deliveries over land, as Blinken claimed. 

On September 25, the day after Murphy’s ProPublica report came out, Blinken made a half-hearted attempt to defend himself. During a morning interview with CBS journalist Adriana Diaz, he said that “I had different assessments from different parts of the State Department, from other agencies that were involved, like USAID. […] My job was to sort through them, which I did, draw some conclusions from that, and we put our report, and we found that Israel needed to do a better job on the humanitarian assistance.” In other words, he claims there was conflicting information and he made the best assessment he could under the circumstances. But that excuse doesn’t hold water for a second. Blinken did not say “there are different accounts of the situation”; he said “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.” He chose to tell Congress something he knew to be untrue, and to ignore and deny credible reports from his own department on Israel’s crime of forced starvation. He can spin it all he wants—and, shamefully, Diaz and her co-hosts let him do so without asking any follow-up questions—but it remains a lie. 

The seriousness of what Blinken has done here is hard to overstate. It has two separate dimensions, the legal and the moral. In the first place, lying to Congress is against the law in itself, regardless of whether the person in question is under oath, and U.S. officials have been sentenced to prison for doing so in the past. To make matters worse, Blinken lied in service of an additional and much greater crime, namely the breaking of Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act. The Act has been around since 1961, but Section 620I was passed in the late 1990s, when Turkey was blocking humanitarian aid from reaching Armenia in much the same way that Israel does to Gaza today. Its text states clearly that: 

No assistance shall be furnished under this Act or the Arms Export Control Act to any country when it is made known to the President that the government of such country prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.

This is completely unambiguous. There is an exception clause in which military aid can be delivered anyway if a president decides it’s “in the national security interest of the United States,” but that requires the president to make a specific report to Congress and explain their reasoning. To be clear, this is not a suggestion or a guideline. It is established U.S. law, and Antony Blinken surely knows it. He chose to break it anyway.

This is all the more disgusting morally, since the Biden/Harris administration has made “honesty” and “decency” a core theme in contrast to the ever-deceitful Donald Trump. In an ironic turn of events, Blinken spent March of this year making ominous warnings about the threat posed to democracies by disinformation, only to spend May spreading disinformation himself. That wasn’t honest, and it wasn’t decent. Blinken has undermined U.S. democracy, too, by undermining the authority of Congress as a democratically elected body. After all, if the members of Congress can be lied to with impunity, why would anyone take them seriously or tell them the truth going forward? And finally, Blinken has also damaged the United States’ diplomatic standing on the world stage. If the secretary of state is willing to lie to his own government, why would he tell the truth to the representatives of any other nation? 

The worst part, though, is the human toll Palestinians have suffered as a direct result of Blinken’s actions. If he had spoken honestly about the information he received from USAID and triggered Section 620I, halting the flow of arms to Benjamin Netanyahu and his accomplices, thousands of people in Gaza who are now dead might be alive. Millions who are now starving might have been spared. Right now, an estimated 2.15 million people—96 percent of Gaza’s population—are facing “severe lack of food,” and roughly 495,000 (or one in five) are “facing starvation.” In February, months before Blinken’s report, the poet Mosab Abu Toha wrote a heartbreaking essay for the New Yorker about “My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza”:

Three days later, on social media, Hamza posted a photograph of what he was eating that day: a ragged brown morsel, seared black on one side and flecked with grainy bits. “This is the wondrous thing we call ‘bread’—a mixture of rabbit, donkey, and pigeon feed,” Hamza wrote in Arabic. “There is nothing good about it except that it fills our bellies. It is impossible to stuff it with other foods, or even break it except by biting down hard with one’s teeth.”

In July, the United Nations revealed that at least “Thirty-four Palestinians have died from malnutrition since 7 October, the majority being children”—and the actual number is likely higher, since it’s hard to get information from a territory that’s actively being bombed. All of this is Blinken’s doing. The blood is on his hands, just as surely as it is on Netanyahu’s. 

It’s also instructive to see the conspiracy of silence in the media about Blinken’s lie, which forms a perfect example of the propaganda model Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman described in Manufacturing Consent. By all rights, the incident should have been front-page, screaming-capitals News, and the public should be outraged about it. What Blinken did is every bit as bad as Ronald Reagan’s lies about trading arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra scandal, or George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s lies about WMDs in Iraq, or any lie Donald Trump or Richard Nixon told in their wretched careers. But the press hasn’t treated it that way.

So far, the New York Times hasn’t published an article on this story at all—certainly not in the print editions for September 25, 26, or 27, the three days after Murphy’s exposé came out. (They have, however, printed articles about lesser controversies involving Blinken.) Neither has the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post, although the Post buried a reference to Blinken’s false testimony halfway through an article on the Biden administration’s Gaza policy. As we’ve seen, CBS questioned Blinken during their September 25 morning interview, but quickly backed down. (For an interesting contrast, compare that interview with the grilling Ta-Nehisi Coates recently got from CBS over his criticism of Israeli apartheid in the West Bank. The same host who said Coates’s book could be found “in the backpack of an extremist,” Tony Dokoupil, was also one of those who didn’t bother to press Blinken.) As usual, Al Jazeera has done better, as have left-leaning journalists like Hafiz Rashid in the New Republic, Jeet Heer in The Nation, Sharon Zhang in Truthout, Jake Johnson in Common Dreams, and Sophie Hurwitz in Mother Jones, along with ProPublica itself. For anyone who follows the news, it’s an object lesson in who you can trust and who you cannot. 

Thankfully, there are some people in the U.S. government who haven’t surrendered their integrity and their backbones. Representative Rashida Tlaib—who has taken on the thankless task of serving as the moral conscience of Congress this past year—has publicly called for Blinken to resign over his falsehoods. (She appears to be the only member of Congress who has, including allegedly socialist “Squad” members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.) One prominent State Department staff member, Stacy Gilbert, actually did resign soon after Blinken gave his May 10 report, blowing the whistle and saying that his statements were “patently false”: 

There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid. […] To deny this is absurd and shameful. That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.

If Gilbert or Tlaib, and not Blinken, were secretary of state, the entire world would be better off. In the past few weeks, others have joined the chorus of voices condemning him, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the antiwar group CODEPINK, and Veterans for Peace, the last of which called for a grand jury to indict Blinken. 

Blinken must go, that much is clear. In fact, he’s going regardless—in early September, he said he won’t serve in a Harris administration if there is one, as he prefers to spend more time with his kids. (There are a lot of Palestinian people who would like to spend time with their kids, too, but thanks to Blinken they’ve had to carry their remains away in plastic bags instead.) But he shouldn’t be allowed to leave on his own terms, without facing consequences for what he’s done. In a remotely just world, the veterans’ demand for a grand jury would already have been answered, and Blinken would be on trial now. There is still time to convene one. At the bare minimum, he ought to be held in contempt of Congress and impeached—but since Republicans in the House have refused to start a new session until “after the election,” that looks unlikely. The other option is for President Biden to fire him. It seems unlikely he’ll do so, as it would cause some embarrassing headlines for Democrats during the last weeks of the election—but then again, actually holding your secretary of state accountable for lying to Congress and the American people would be a powerful way to demonstrate some of the “honesty” and “decency” he’s always going on about. 

But as Jeet Heer points out, just ousting Blinken is not enough. He’s hardly the only U.S. leader to be complicit in the starvation of Gaza; with the exception of honorable dissenters like Stacy Gilbert, the entire Biden/Harris administration is. What should we make of Samantha Power, for instance? She built her career as a scholar of genocide before being appointed to lead USAID, but has refused to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide today. New York Magazine reports that Power was “deeply involved” in her own agency’s report to Blinken, yet in an interview with MSNBC on September 26, when she was asked directly about Blinken’s discounting of USAID’s findings, she dodged the question, saying only that “everyone [in the administration] has been clear that more aid needed to flow.” This is another colossal moral failing, almost as bad as Blinken’s.

 The rot goes deeper than that, too. Israel has been blockading Gaza since 2007, and the United States has arguably been ignoring international law (which forbids the collective punishment of an entire population for the actions of individuals, or even groups like Hamas) to arm its occupation the whole time. The U.S. has also violated international law and human rights in many other cases around the world. Really, Antony Blinken should never have been allowed to become secretary of state in the first place, as he supported the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003; that alone should have been disqualifying. Now, he needs to go—but it’s also important that his replacement not be just more of the same. We don’t need another staunchly pro-Israel, pro-weapons industry interventionist who’s been hanging around Washington reciting the same terrible ideas for decades. (Or, God help us, Liz Cheney.) The American people, and the rest of the world, deserve better than that. The whole foreign policy “blob” needs to be dismantled and cast aside, and Blinken is just the first man up.