On Jan. 12, just days before the inauguration of Donald Trump as President, CBS News’ “60 Minutes” program ran a feature titled “Former State Department Officials Concerned about the U.S. Role in Israel’s War in Gaza.” The program ran quotes from interviews with Josh Paul, Hala Rharrit and Andrew Miller, including pictures of the victims of Israeli atrocities and other horrors.
Interviewer Cecilia Vega was probing, and allowed the former officials to speak openly about the U.S. government responsibility for the atrocities committed by the U.S. sponsorship of Israel’s genocide, focused on the women and children who were slaughtered.
Hala Rharrit, a 20-year State Department veteran with postings in Africa, Asia and the Mideast, was assigned to monitor Arab media following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Working from Dubai, she reported that as she sent documentation of U.S. complicity in mass deaths, especially of children, she was told to “shut up” and berated for sending graphic photos of children who had starved to death or been killed by U.S. weapons. “I would show the complicity that was indisputable. Fragments of U.S. bombs next to massacres of—of ch—mostly children. And that’s the devastation. It’s been overwhelmingly children.”
Three months into the war, Rharrit was told that her reports “were no longer needed,” and she resigned in April 2024. CBS’s report includes the fact that “Thirteen officials—including from the State Department, White House and Army—have publicly resigned in protest,” and that hundreds more have made their opposition known through the State Department’s internal dissent line.
Josh Paul, the former head of the State Department’s Bureau of Political Military Affairs, one of the Department’s first officials to publicly resign in protest over U.S. policy, elaborated incisively on the reasons for his resignation over the U.S.’s wholesale provision of weapons to Israel in blatant disregard for the internal protocol requiring careful analysis of each weapons request to ensure it respected international law. The latter procedure was thrown out the window. Only these three from State are interviewed, but it is enough to drive home the point of responsibility, and that the government refused to listen to, or respond to, the multiple reports from these truth-tellers.
The program concludes when Vega asks, “How does this end?” Andrew Miller replies: “When Israel says it’s over. Absent intervention from the United States or for someone else to compel or to force a decision—it ends when Netanyahu says it’s over.”
