Pentagon Admits Biden’s Pathetic Gaza Pier Is Dead

Less than two weeks after its installation, the pier constructed by the United States to facilitate aid into Gaza has been completely removed after it broke apart in the water.

The Pentagon admitted Thursday that the remaining parts of the $320 million boondoggle were dismantled after the pier was damaged in rough waters off the coast of Gaza on May 28, rendering it unusable. Israel has closed several land crossings, preventing aid from getting into the Gaza Strip, and the Israel Defense Forces have fired on food convoys and looked the other way as settlers have blocked aid from entering the remaining open land crossings. The U.S. has thus far resorted to aerial aid drops and, more recently, the manmade pier to facilitate aid, rather than demand Israel open up crossings and crack down on settler obstruction of aid delivery.

Now, according to Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh, the pier is going offline for at least the next week as it is repaired and rebuilt in Ashkelon. Since its construction, the pier had allowed for only 1,000 tons of humanitarian aid to be delivered to Gaza. According to United Nations World Food Programme chief economist Arif Husain, northern Gaza alone requires 4,500 tons of food a month.

At the beginning of May, prior to Israel’s Rafah offensive, the U.N. declared that northern Gaza had entered “full-blown famine.” The situation has worsened since then. It’s clear that, even when operational, the pier had hardly made a dent in the dire situation. Now, battered, broken, and eventually towed ashore, it stands as a symbol of American fecklessness in the face of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Asked on Tuesday about the damage sustained by the costly pier, Singh said, “If you want to characterize it as a failure, I leave it to you.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s recent pardon of Daniel Perry, who shot and killed a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020, is receiving backlash from state attorneys general around the country.

A group of 14 state attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, sent a letter on Wednesday to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s office urging the Department of Justice to look into whether Perry violated any federal civil rights laws. In addition to James, the letter was signed by the Democratic attorneys general of Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Vermont, and the District of Columbia.

“We urge the Department to open an investigation into whether Mr. Perry violated federal criminal law, including specifically several federal criminal civil rights laws,” the letter states. “We note that whether or not Texas law gives Mr. Perry a defense to state prosecution for his actions here, Texas law does not prevent a federal prosecution for Mr. Perry’s act of killing someone for racial reasons in order to prevent him from exercising constitutional rights.”

Two weeks ago, Abbott pardoned Perry, an Uber driver who was convicted in 2023 of murdering anti–police brutality protester Garrett Foster at an Austin Black Lives Matter rally in 2020 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. After Perry’s conviction, his messages and social media posts were released to the public, where he self-identified as “a racist” and wrote of wanting to “go to Dallas to shoot looters.” With his pardon, Abbott even restored Perry’s firearm rights, claiming that “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.”

The attorneys general pointed to those particular laws as being a major reason for their letter.

Mr. Foster was openly carrying a firearm at the protest—an act that is legal in Texas—and Mr. Perry claimed that he had acted in self-defense, relying on Texas’ so-called “stand your ground” law. In pardoning Mr. Perry, Governor Abbott also cited to Texas’ “stand your ground” law. The undersigned Attorneys General are concerned that these “stand your ground” laws encourage vigilantes to attend protests armed and ready to shoot and kill those who exercise their First Amendment rights.

Abbott has openly feuded with the federal government about migrants and LGBTQ+ rights, and sent state troopers in full riot gear to violently clear college Gaza solidarity encampments. In spite of, or more likely because of his actions, Donald Trump has Abbott on his short list as a possible vice president.

Chief Justice John Roberts on Thursday rejected a request by Democratic senators to discuss Samuel Alito’s impartiality following concerns about a pair of January 6–aligned flags that had been spotted flying at two of the justice’s residences.

In a letter addressed to Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Roberts claimed that “the format proposed—a meeting with leaders only of one party who have expressed an interest in matters currently pending before the court—simply underscores that participating in such a meeting would be inadvisable.”

The rejection follows a similar shutdown by Alito himself, who issued a letter to the pair on Wednesday stating that he would not recuse himself from lawsuits relating to the 2020 presidential election—specifically, Trump v. United States—and claiming that his impartiality had not “reasonably” come into question.

Alito was accused of compromising the court’s impartiality after a “Stop the Steal” upside-down U.S. flag was spotted at his house in Arlington, Virginia, and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag—a Revolutionary War symbol adopted by Christian nationalists—was seen flying at the justice’s New Jersey vacation home.

Alito has attempted to wipe his hands of both incidents, blaming the controversial messaging on his wife, whom he described as “fond of flying flags.” Her “reasons for flying the flag are not relevant” to his ability to weigh in on the immunity case, he said in his letter to Durbin and Whitehouse.

But Democrats aren’t letting up on the issue, digging up alternative pathways to hold Alito to account that don’t rely on his having the final say. In a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday, Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin argued that the executive branch could still step in to challenge the judiciary’s ethics.

“The U.S. Department of Justice … can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and [Clarence] Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law,” Raskin posited.

“This recusal statute, if triggered, is not a friendly suggestion,” Raskin continued. “It is Congress’s command, binding on the justices, just as the due process clause is. The Supreme Court cannot disregard this law just because it directly affects one or two of its justices. Ignoring it would trespass on the constitutional separation of powers because the justices would essentially be saying that they have the power to override a congressional command.”

The Trump campaign is predictably resorting to the boss’s tactics amid new allegations that he used a racial slur to refer to a Black contestant on The Apprentice—and that it was caught on tape.

Responding to the bombshell claims by former Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt, originally published in Slate, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung launched into a tirade on Twitter on Thursday.

“Prove it, bitch,” Cheung wrote.

“You can’t, because it’s a fake and bullshit story your dumb ass is peddling because Biden is hemorrhaging support from Black Americans.”

There’s no evidence to suggest that Pruitt, who was until this year bound by a nondisclosure agreement, is lying about Trump’s use of the n-word, or about his rigging the show so that Kwame Jackson lost in the finale of the series’s first season. But it is very much on brand for the Trump campaign, and for Cheung, an apparent “virtuoso at mimicking his boss,” in particular, to reflexively dismiss the story as “fake and bullshit.”

The Biden campaign, while not exactly “hemorrhaging support,” is struggling to retain the Black support on which Biden rode to the Democratic nomination, and eventually the White House, in 2020. According to a New York Times poll, Biden is winning only 63 percent of support from Black registered voters in a one-on-one race with Trump, down from the 92 percent of Black voters who supported him in 2020.

Meanwhile, Trump, who recently spoke at a rally in the South Bronx, is making a play to appeal to Black voters. It is unlikely that dismissing credible allegations of racism online is part of that plan. But when the only tool the campaign has is a hammer, everything, even the candidate’s reported use of racial slurs, looks like a nail.

Samantha Power used to be a vocal opponent of genocidal action—until her government underlings began resigning in mass protest over the Biden administration’s continued support for the war in Gaza.

At least 19 internal dissent memos have circulated within the U.S. Agency for International Development, where several employees have left their posts over the administration’s refusal to address the atrocities in Gaza. One now former senior adviser, Alexander Smith, cited an environment in which specific people “cannot be acknowledged as fully human.”

Smith told The Guardian that he was given a choice to resign or be fired after his presentation on child mortality among Palestinians was canceled by the agency’s leadership. He resigned on Monday.

“USAID has always prided itself on our programs supporting democracy, human rights, and rule of law,” Smith wrote to Power in a leaked letter obtained by the publication. “In Ukraine, we call for legal redress when people are victimized, and name perpetrators of violence.… We boldly state ‘Slava Ukraini’ in peppy promotional videos.

“When it comes to the Palestinians, however, we avoid saying anything about their right to statehood, the abuses they’re currently suffering, or which powers have been violating their basic rights to freedom, self-determination, livelihoods, and clean water,” he wrote.

But Power was not always so complicit in state-sponsored violence. In fact, her tacit support for the Biden administration’s actions appears to run directly against her own ethical code. The book sleeve of A Problem From Hell, Power’s examination of America’s silent response to genocide in the twentieth century that won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction (among other awards), advertises the former ambassador’s stance on government employees who fail to protect the people.

“Samantha Power poses a question that haunts our nation’s past: Why do American leaders who vow ‘never again’ repeatedly fail to marshal the will and the might to stop genocide?” the jacket asks.