Despite Secret Bases in Israel, the Hamas Attack was a Suprise to U.S. Intelligence
My latest in Newsweek on the now declared Hamas war and the U.S. military’s involvement on the ground. With regard to the missed intelligence, I’m sure that U.S. intelligence will counter over time that it had “signs” just not the exact date and time of the Hamas incursion. But there’s no denying that it took no action to protect U.S. personnel in country, or the near 650,000 American citizens on the ground.
https://www.newsweek.com/how-us-secret-presence-israel-missed-hamas-attack-1834653
How the U.S. Secret Presence in Israel Missed the Hamas Attack
William M. Arkin On 10/13/23 at 3:08 PM EDT
Israeli intelligence failed to warn of or avert last weekend's Hamas strike from Gaza, but U.S. intelligence—with more than 650,000 American citizens and significant military assets at risk on the ground in Israel—also failed to warn of prospective threats.
"The United States and by extension the Biden administration isn't responsible for Israel's intelligence failure," says a senior intelligence official who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly with Newsweek. "But there are plenty of reasons why, purely in our own interests, we should have been on top of this. That we didn't detect the attacks shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
The reason, that official and others say, is that in the overall list of priorities, even in the Middle East, Israel ranks behind countries like Syria and Iraq where American troops are already engaged in combat. Hamas in particular, officials say, is mostly the responsibility of Israeli intelligence, and the United States relies upon Israel for most of its inside information on the group. where the United States is dependent. Third, the U.S. collects far more than it is able to analyze about Israel and elsewhere, an endemic problem, and one that has dogged the system for decades and is only getting worse.