Gaza Whistleblowers: U.S. Officials Who Resigned in Protest

Christian Appy
Hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar, Gaza Whistleblowers: U.S. Officials Who Resigned in Protest. I’m Chris Appy, Director of the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Tonight’s event features three extraordinary people who resigned from their government positions in protest of U.S. support for the Israeli War on Gaza.

Before we turn to them, let me briefly mention some upcoming events. Next week, this year’s Ellsberg Activist-in-Residence, Varshini Prakash, will be at UMass. She is a climate justice activist who co-founded the Sunrise Movement. Next Wednesday at 07:00 PM, she will be speaking on campus in the Old Chapel. On March 13th, we’ll host a webinar on the twin existential threats of nuclear war and climate change. In April, we have a set of three webinars on the history and legacies of the American War in Vietnam to mark the 50th anniversary of that war’s end. As a capstone event on April 30th, we are delighted to sponsor in person at UMass, a reading and talk by the acclaimed Vietnamese novelist and poet Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai. For more information, please go to our website, eipad.org.

Our work is inspired by perhaps the most famous whistleblower in U.S. history, Daniel Ellsberg, a former government official who, in 1971, gave to the New York Times and 18 other newspapers a 7,000-page classified history of the Vietnam War that exposed more than two decades of government lies about the causes and conduct of the war. Those top-secret documents were soon dubbed the Pentagon Papers. For that act of moral courage, Ellsberg was indicted on a dozen felony charges, some of them based on the deeply flawed Espionage Act of 1917, and he faced a possible 115 years in prison.

Ellsberg was the first person criminally charged and tried under the Espionage Act for giving classified documents not to a foreign agent or foreign country, but to the American press and people. In this century, there have been many more such prosecutions. After Ellsberg’s trial was dismissed because of government crimes committed against him, he devoted the next 50 years to non-violent activism on behalf of peace, nuclear disarmament, First Amendment rights, and a more democratic and restrained foreign policy. He died last June at the age of 92. If Ellsberg were still alive, I’m quite sure he would have reached out to our panelists to express his gratitude and to offer his support, as he did with dozens of whistleblowers over the years. He understood that truth-tellers do not act in a vacuum, but are greatly impacted by their times and are often inspired by other truth-tellers, as he was. He often said that courage is contagious.

Tonight’s discussion will be moderated by Kelly Vlahos. She is a senior adviser at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank founded in 2019 to challenge the decades-long obsession of U.S. foreign policy decision-makers with global military dominance and war. Kelly Vlahos is the Editorial Director of the Institute’s online magazine, Responsible Statecraft, where many of her own articles often appear. Previously, she served as Executive Editor, Managing Editor, and frequent writer on foreign policy at the American Conservative Magazine. She will introduce tonight’s panelist, Kelly.

Kelley Vlahos 
Thank you, Christian. Thank you for that introduction, and thank you to the Ellsberg Initiative for putting this talk together and for all the critical work you are doing to advance the spirit and inspiration of the late Daniel Ellsberg, who is a great hero to all of us. I’m especially inspired by the speaker the initiative has assembled here today. Israel’s war on Gaza has been a true test to humanitarians and advocates of civil rights and international law, particularly those working in the U.S. government. While the Israelis have said their war is on Hamas and have boasted that they are the most moral military in the world, having spent the last 18 months attempting to keep civilians out of harm, the hellscape seen in photographs, videos, and satellite images, tell a very different story. Even President Trump has called Gaza uninhabitable.

Kelley Vlahos 
We have heard all the data. More than 48,000 dead, possibly 60,000 or more, when you include the bodies that have not been yet found from underneath the rubble, the sheer lack of food, medicine, supplies for basic necessities, more than 80% of the buildings destroyed, no clean water, open sewage, the criminal gangs that have had the tacit approval of the IDF to terrorize the population, including looting the few aid trucks that do get into the strip, the tens of thousands of orphan children, babies freezing to death without nourishment in tents, operations in hospitals without anesthesia or proper sterilization of equipment, the list goes on. The issue that I believe has come up time and again is that U.S. taxpayers have been subsidizing all of this and have had little say in whether it is in our best interest to continue doing so. From our diminished credibility on the world stage to our security in the region overall, the answer seems clear. Washington is playing with fire.

Two of our guests here today said enough was enough, and the third was squeezed out of his job for trying to make the point that the U.S. has an obligation through its own laws to refrain from supplying nations weapons of war when they are used to starve and kill civilians. I’d like to introduce them now. Let them tell you their stories and proceed to have a candid conversation about whistleblowing, taking a stand, asking whether their actions have helped, and what challenges that people of principle may face as the Gaza war has not yet ended and a new administration has taken the helm on the policy.

I will start with Alexander Smith. Smith, who is both a lawyer and public health expert, had worked for USAID for four years. He had been selected to speak at the Agency’s Global Gender Equality Conference. His paper, Intersectional Gender Lens in Gaza: Ethnicity, Religion, Geography, Legal Status, and Maternal Child Health Outcomes, was pre-accepted for the small USAID conference. He was scheduled to present on May 22nd of last year. USAID took issue with the slides in his presentation. A slide regarding Israel and its adherence to international law raised hackles, leading to the loss of his position. He was told to resign or face dismissal. Smith was a contractor advising on gender and maternal public health on behalf of the Highbury Defense Group, and we’re looking forward to hearing his story tonight.

Harrison Mann is a 13-year veteran of the U.S. Army who, in June, [inaudible 00:07:19] and an executive officer at the DIA, Africa Regional Center, that’s a defense intelligence agency. Prior to his posting at the DIA, Mann worked at the U.S. Embassy in Tunis in its office for security cooperation and led an army civil affairs team combating regional smuggling under U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain. He began his army career as an infantry officer, is now a military affairs fellow at DAWN, and is a senior fellow at Win Without War.

And Annelle Sheline. In May 2024, Annelle resigned from her position at the State Department, where she served for a year as a Foreign Affairs Officer in the Office of Near Eastern Affairs in the Department of United States Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. There, she worked on promoting human rights in the Middle East and North Africa. She resigned, stating at the time that quote, “I believe strongly in the mission and in the important work of that office. However, as a representative of the government that is directly enabling what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be a genocide in Gaza, such work has become almost impossible. Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I’ve decided to resign from my position at the Department of State.” Today, Annelle works full-time with me at the Quincy Institute as a Middle East fellow. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Arab Center in Washington and a visiting scholar at Georgetown University.

I am in awe of my three panelists here, and I’m looking forward to hearing each of your stories and getting to know you a little bit better and also kind of teasing out what you’re thinking about the current situation in Gaza, the current administration’s policies, and some thoughts on whistleblowing and taking a stand in general. I just want to mention to the audience here: if you have a question for one of our panelists or all of our panelists, please put it down in the Q&A, and we will be sure to try to get to as many as possible in the hour and a half that we have.

Let me start with Alexander. Can you tell us– I know I did the broad brush of your experience, but can you tell us a little bit about what happened to you and basically just walk us through what you were doing for the government through the Highbury contractor and what you think really triggered your dismissal? How did that all play out?

Alexander Smith
Yeah, great questions. Thank you for doing a lot of the heavy lifting with explaining the set of circumstances. So yeah, as you said, I have been a contractor with USAID for four years. Contractors are indistinguishable from direct hires. We all mix together and have USAID.gov email addresses or had, I should say, past tense. The work that I was doing was on gender and social inclusion, maternal and child health and nutrition, and infectious disease. In that position, I would go to developing countries where we had programs and I would review the effectiveness of the programs. I went to Zambia and Nepal earlier in 2024 and was really good at what I do. I’ve found gaps in our programs and new ways to get TB drugs to pregnant women in Zambia, for example, and found better ways to make our programs efficient in Nepal. Generally speaking, I’m a very big fan of what USAID does around the world. I also volunteered on the COVID-19 vaccine distribution team, getting a half billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines out to the world. I also worked on polio and volunteered on the Ukraine rapid response team, the team that was set up to rebuild Ukraine’s health systems that had been damaged or destroyed during the war with Russia.

For those reasons, I had a good sense of what USAID could do and was supposed to do in times of emergencies and crises. I found that USAID was not doing those same things for Gaza. We were sending food aid, which could get across the border, but we were not talking about rebuilding their health system. We didn’t have the rapid response team set up. If we had, I would have volunteered for it again. Then I kept asking leadership why we weren’t doing that. I never got an answer. It came to a head, as you said, in that conference where I attempted to give a presentation that was given the green light back in February. In May, I was going to present at a conference on gender and program efficiency. What I wanted to do with that presentation was to talk about maternal and child health and the impacts of starvation, displacement, and what we know from other conflicts that have happened before.

In case anybody wasn’t aware of USAID, I wanted very much for USAID leadership to take note that we know what happens to people, especially to maternal and child health in conflict. You see deaths from bleeding, infection, and hypertension, the three main causes of maternal death, skyrocket. What Israel was doing, the policies they were implementing, were ensuring that women were more likely to die from those three causes but also were less likely to get screened for and less likely to get treatment for those same three causes. So what we were looking at was a perfect storm of starvation, infectious disease, very preventable deaths from these basic causes, and it’s not mysterious. We know exactly what to expect from these kinds of policies.

Naively, I wanted to present on that, thinking that perhaps people in USAID just aren’t aware of how dangerous and awful the situation is. Then, on the day I was going to present, I was told that I would not be presenting– the day before I was going to present. They were surprisingly frank with me. They said that Blinken had received reports on Israel’s creation of the famine and had decided not to act on that. We, therefore, needed to take that same policy within USAID of not talking about the famine. They also said that because Netanyahu had been indicted by the ICC that very day, that, therefore, it was a more sensitive issue that I shouldn’t talk about. That’s why they took objection to the international humanitarian law slide. The international humanitarian law: the law of warfare and what can and can’t be done to health systems.

I was told by the contracting agency that there was a difference in personalities after four years of very starred and positive feedback and reviews of my work. I was suddenly told that I would be leaving. I did talk to some of my managers at USAID. They had no personality differences. They actually wanted me to stay on and reapply for my own job through a different contractor, but at that point, I thought I didn’t want to do that. And so I wrote my resignation letter, which are free to share if you like, talking about the reasons why I couldn’t work for USAID and summed it up as “I can’t work for an agency where some people are considered people, some emergencies are considered worthy of our response based on the race of the people involved.” That’s my story in a nutshell. I’m happy to answer more questions about it.

Kelley Vlahos 
You didn’t criticize the government or USAID directly in your slideshow. This was a matter of them not wanting you to say certain things or bring attention to certain things. It’s not like you blamed anybody for any of this. You didn’t go that far, did you?

Alexander Smith
No. In my resignation letter, I certainly do lay some blame at the feet of Samantha Power, who I knew from being a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. I used to really be a big fan of her and go to her lecture. She certainly knows what genocide is and has still chosen today not to talk about the genocide. But no, you’re correct. In my presentation, I was sticking only to public health data, to the facts. I was presenting what the baseline data was before the conflict, which was surprisingly positive. Gaza actually had a slightly better maternal mortality ratio than many neighboring countries and even the United States in 2023 and 2022. And then we can predict what it would be now. It’s going to be much higher.

Kelley Vlahos 
Were your colleagues surprised at the reaction to your slideshow and the ultimatum that you were given?

Alexander Smith
Yeah, many colleagues were planning on attending my presentation. It probably would have had an audience of maybe 30 or 40 people. Ironically, by stopping me from giving that presentation, I then went on to talk about it on CNN and Al Jazeera. They probably didn’t expect that.

Kelley Vlahos 
Yeah, exactly. So it went from an audience of 30 to a worldwide audience, basically. I’m sure your remarks were a lot more pointed when you were– the shackles were off, so to speak, on how you were speaking about the data.

Alexander Smith
I was always very careful, however, not to impugn all of USAID. I always said in my interviews that I think USAID does great work. They do very valuable work. As we’ve seen over the last few days, that work is sorely missed when it’s gone. But I said on this one issue, they really do need to acknowledge that the famine is happening, that Israel is causing the famine,  and that the deprivation of basic medical supplies, oxytocic to prevent bleeding for pregnant women, that these were going to cause deaths, and they needed to acknowledge that.

Kelley Vlahos 
How much of a chill do you think your experience is having or had had or still having on other people who are either working as a contractor or, like Annelle, who are actually employees of the State Department? When they see somebody getting squeezed out of a job for a slideshow, I mean, wow. I can imagine everybody’s buttoning up and saying, “Well, I’m not going to go there in my slideshow or my report. I’m going to stay right within the lines.”

Alexander Smith
I was actually very proud. About 150, I think it was 200, in the end, colleagues did sign a letter internally to Samantha Power and the leadership saying that they objected to what happened to me. They didn’t take that public, and I don’t think there was a lot of talk of Gaza after what happened to me.

Kelley Vlahos 
Thank you. I want to go right to Annelle because she has somewhat of a parallel experience in terms of working for a government agency that ostensibly is supposed to be focused on these human rights issues. You found that you, too, were, I don’t want to say shackled, but there were limitations on what you could say and how concerns from people within your department and others at the State Department were not being listened to, that was like blowing in the wind? Can you talk a little bit about your experience and why you chose to resign?

Annelle Sheline
Sure. The work that I was trying to do in advocating for human rights, as I wrote in the op-ed I published at the time I resigned, had become really impossible because even though I wasn’t directly covering Israel-Palestine, trying to advocate for human rights anywhere else in the Middle East, what credibility did the United States have to do so? To be clear, the United States already didn’t have a lot of credibility as an advocate for human rights, but in particular, there were groups and individuals who had worked with the U.S. government in the past, thinking in particular efforts to strengthen judicial independence, for example, that’s under attack in places like Tunisia or trying to protect journalists in Morocco or Egypt.

We’d meet with individuals that the office had a relationship with, and we would want to talk to them about what they were facing, their own rights being abused, or how we could support them, and they would want to talk about Gaza. We couldn’t really say anything beyond just, “Well, that’s not really why we’re here,” despite– I myself and many other people in my office fully agreeing with their position that without talking about Gaza, it was fairly impossible, in particular, to put any pressure on any of these governments. When we had a meeting with a counterpart from a Middle Eastern government trying to make any argument about human rights, they would just smile knowingly at us and just be like, “Really? Interesting.”

It had just gotten to a place where it was really impossible to try to do the work that I’d been hired to do. As I’ve said and said in my resignation statement, I wasn’t initially planning to go public with it. I had not been at the State Department for very long. Kelly, you mentioned that I resigned in May. It was even earlier. I resigned in March.

For me, as I mentioned in the op-ed, one of the things that had happened not long before I resigned was the immolation of Aaron Bushnell, which came at a time– so people can remember a year ago, the uncommitted movement was starting to gain some momentum in terms of trying to push Biden to address– Biden was still the candidate for one thing– trying to push the Democratic Party to take a different stance on Gaza. You had an act of such horrific desperation as this suicide outside the Israeli embassy in D.C. I think it was his act of great sacrifice and courage, as well as just being in touch with other folks inside the State Department who were really horrified by what was happening because I planned to resign privately. I let it be known internally that I was going to resign privately over Gaza, but I wasn’t going to go public. And colleagues said, “Please go public. Just try.” Then it did end up, I think, getting more attention. In part just because there was this sense at that time of just like, “What is the United States government doing here? And no one seems to be speaking out about it.” So that– for me, one thing that was particularly meaningful was the fact that after that, I was able to connect with Alex, Harrison, and the other resignees, and it has been extremely meaningful to have them as a community, although things do look different now under this new administration.

Kelley Vlahos 
One of the things that just struck me while you were talking was you were– and Alex and Harrison as well– you weren’t working for a government that was at war in Gaza. You weren’t working for the government that was holding the gun, doing all of these things, and dropping the bombs. You were working for a government that was funding, that had a long-standing special relationship with Israel. We give them $4 billion a year to build up their military-industrial complex. Now, did it strike you as odd that there had to be this chill on the speech at the State Department about the human rights violations that were going on when it was happening by another government in another country? It wasn’t even– you weren’t even set out or expected to protect your own government, which still would be difficult, and maybe all three of you still would have done what you did, but did it strike you as odd that there was this unspoken edict for another country’s behavior?

Annelle Sheline
Yes and no. I mean, it is inherently odd the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and as someone who has studied the Middle East for a long time, it’s one of the questions I would get most often from people in the Middle East of just what explains why the U.S. continues to provide– this was long before October 7th. So seeing, for example, even things like my office at the State Department, which had been involved in trying, for example, to support human rights NGOs in Israel. There has been extremely important work done by Israeli NGOs documenting human abuses of Palestinians, but even something like that, which is central to what DRL does, working and supporting these various NGOs across the region and across the whole world. But the fact that even that was seen as too politically nuclear to support a human rights NGO in Israel, that it would get blowback on the hill, or get some media attention such that it was walked back.

Just the glaring exception of Israel, whether it’s the work that DRL does, whether it’s the military partnership, whether it’s the way that the U.S. allows Israel to not only, as you mentioned, build up their own military industrial base, but to be subsidized to do so, such that they eventually will not only continue.  I mean, they receive so much from the U.S. military industry, but also, we’re subsidizing them to build up their own, such that they become less dependent on the U.S., in many ways at the expense of American companies who profit from contracts that allow them to send materials to Israel. It is in many ways just so directly contradictory to the interests of not only the broader questions of the morality of the United States or the leadership of the United States but also the big companies that usually get to direct so much of U.S. foreign policy, unfortunately. Even Israel trumps those relationships. So yes, I would agree that it is odd.

Kelley Vlahos 
Yeah. I mean, at a certain level, you wonder, “Okay, we have this great relationship, and we’re giving them all this money. We’re helping them build this massive industrial base.” At some point, couldn’t we have just stepped up and said, “You might not want to do that. This isn’t in your best interest to destroy Gaza and kill all these people.” It seems like that, to me, would not be out of the realm of what a friend might do. Maybe a little bit of tough love. I know this all sounds very naive, given the circumstances, but just because we have this special relationship doesn’t mean that we just turned a blind eye. I think we just chose the latter. Turned a blind eye instead of the tough love.

Harrison, I remember when you resigned, it obviously really broke through the headlines because you’re a member of the U.S. military, and of all of us on the screen right now, it seemed as though Annelle and Alexander are coming from more of the human rights, public health realm, but the U.S. military seemed to be– it’s expected to be apolitical, for one, and not ideological. But also, there was this sense, and there still is, that there’s this very close cooperative relationship between the two militaries. You had military voices like retired General Milley, who is out there actually defending Israeli forces and their killing of civilians and basically saying, “Well, the U.S. did it, too, in World War II,” and pursuing this line that the IDF is the most moral military in the world. I got this sense that the U.S. military is pretty four square with Israel, or at least there wasn’t any dissent that could be heard. When you came out, it was a big deal. Can you talk a bit about what your breaking point was?

Harrison Mann
Yeah. Thanks for that question, Kelly, and thanks for having us, Chris, and everybody on the line. Probably like Annelle and Alexander, I was living through a lot of really difficult cognitive dissonance for a while because I was seeing the same stuff that all of you did on Twitter or social media of all these really horrific images and understanding all these innocent people were being killed, and then going back into the office the next day. I would say, I don’t know how many total U.S. agencies were tasked with supporting the Israeli government or the Israeli military, but we were probably in the top four or five of them. The primary mission of DIA, per its director after October 7th, was supporting Israel. I was in the Middle East Department of DIA. That was our primary focus. After October 7th, my job was basically the assistant to the head of the Middle East Department of DIA and SES, too. So, in our world, a relatively senior guy.

I’d see those images and understand that that was wrong the way you all did, and then go into the office. People were working longer hours, but we were treating it like business as usual. And just working harder to make sure that we got files, reports, or assessments to Israeli counterparts and that we were working to coordinate the DOD and Intel support for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, the IDF, and the other IDF subordinate intelligence services.

After October 7th, I think everybody who follows the region, even those who don’t, knew exactly what was going to happen. We knew Israel was going to do something terrible to Gaza, and most of us thought it was going to last three or four weeks like it usually does. That’s what my colleagues expected who were more experienced in the region than me. It’s what I thought. It’s like, “Well, this is going to be really ugly. They’re going to do the same thing that they always do.” After the first two or so weeks, it was clear that this was on a whole different scale, but the real thing that was the difference that we could all sense from the outside was that there was no voice in the U.S. telling them to stop. Usually, when something like this happens, the reason it ends is because, eventually, the president puts his foot down. It’s a bipartisan tradition. Biden did it earlier in 2021.

But because of my position, I had more access than normal people to see if anybody was even talking about putting their foot down. From the level of the NSC down to the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence, down to the head of my own agency, down to my own office. I was looking every day while I was preparing the brief book for my boss and dealing with a lot of assessments and correspondence that would have told me if anybody was even considering moderating the level of support we were given, either at a national level, within the intel community, or within our agency. I was also looking for a sign, okay, that wasn’t coming up, and I was waiting, looking every day for any taste of that. “Well, okay, we’re not doing that. Are we at least recognizing the scale of the killing and the civilian suffering?” The answer to that was yes. I can tell you the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff got a briefing every day from his intelligence director, who was a three-star general, who had the updated casualty count as accurate as anybody could get it. We had that.

Everybody knew what was going on, and nobody was putting into writing what was actually happening, though, which was that Israel was deliberately, or at that time, the most generous estimate, we could say, with wanton disregard for civilian life, killing thousands and thousands of innocent people. It was surreal. Going between that and then going back into the real world when I got out of the skiff, the secret facility where we worked, went home, and saw the other side of what was happening.

After a few weeks of that, I’d seen enough to know that nothing was going to change. I had confidence in that because I’d seen initial discussions, many echelons above me, about concerns that we might be facilitating war crimes by sharing intel with Israeli counterparts. So, people had those concerns. Now, with interviews and articles we’ve seen, I think it’s pretty safe to say that the DNI herself had those concerns. The resolution to those was guidance that, basically, if your Israeli counterpart tells you they’re not going to use it for gross violations of human rights, they’re not. Case closed. We’ll take their assurance, and that’s the same standard that for a long time we held for arms transfers and for other parts of the relationship.

When I saw that, I knew that things were not going to improve, at least not in the short run. I already knew what I was contributing to. I was just hoping it was going to end. That I wouldn’t have to do anything about it, to be honest, but I gave up on that. Not to join Annelle in correcting dates here. I did get out of the army in June, but it takes six months to do it. If you’re moving at breakneck speed. That’s the beauty of military bureaucracy. And so I put in my paperwork in November. I didn’t tell anybody why it was the real reason I was leaving because I was afraid. I was afraid of both professional repercussions, but mostly social repercussions, I guess, in being a pariah and being cast out by the people I worked with who I really liked and respected otherwise. I waited and waited to see if there was going to be a good reason for me to retract my resignation paperwork. Of course, it never came. We got one horrific event after another that showed us that no matter what happened, we weren’t going to change course on this policy. As I was finally getting out, it didn’t really occur to me to tell anybody about it or to be public like I was.

I want to touch on something Annelle said about Aaron Bushnell. That happened, I think, on a weekend. I came back into the office the next day, and we’d have big flat screens playing the news, playing CNN, NBC, or whatever. That news story was playing on the screen in our office, where our main job collectively was assisting the Israeli military. Nobody talked about it. You feel crazy. A succession of events happened, including the start of student protests in the spring, the Rafah Red Line that was broken, and the report from the State Department, the NSM 20, that basically said, “Yeah, Israel might be doing war crimes, but we’re not going to stop sending them weapons,” that I felt like if I had any tools left at my disposal, I needed to use them because that’s how hopeless the situation was. That led me to speak out.

Kelley Vlahos 
I have to ask you, and maybe this is more of a clarification, is the U.S. military helping Israel target on the ground in Gaza? Is that common knowledge?

Harrison Mann
I would say barely. Our various intelligence services were trying to help them identify tunnels and underground facilities and tried to help them identify where hostages were and where senior Hamas leadership was. By the way, that was under the theory that if we helped them find the hostages and help them kill Sinwar and all the senior leaders, that would bring the war to an end. So on that strategic level, yes, I don’t think any of that help was super useful. When the Israelis bombed things in Gaza, they did it generally without needing our help.

Kelley Vlahos 
I’m asking you this because it does seem to be a big mystery how much integration there has been between the U.S. military and Israel since October 7th. Can you shed any more light?

Harrison Mann
I would say we should not call that a mystery. So, just to indicate how little of a mystery that is, I think by this last summer, we sent the CENTCOM Commander, which is the general in charge of all of our forces in the Middle East, to sit in Israel at their Pentagon equivalent or at one of their operations centers to help them plan the retaliation strikes on Iran. So that was very public.

Kelley Vlahos 
Oh, yeah.

Harrison Mann
I would like to be clear that’s certainly indicative of the level of close communication between the militaries and between the intelligence services, which, of course, predates October 7th but was prioritized and expanded after October 7th. That doesn’t mean that there are U.S. personnel telling the Israelis what to bomb in Gaza, but there’s extensive intelligence sharing. There are a lot of other countries in the region where Israel does not have as much intelligence collection that they are also interested in bombing or attacking. It’s not just Gaza.

Kelley Vlahos 
I know at the beginning, we were told that a number– I don’t know if they were Special Forces or some sort of personnel were actually headed to Israel to help find the hostages, and then everybody had to stop talking about it. I never got a sense of how many U.S. troops, Special Forces, or what have you were actually on the ground there, but do we have personnel on the ground there?

Harrison Mann
There was never anybody in Gaza. The best I can tell, and this is through friends who are journalists, is that there were maybe some Navy Seals who went to Israel to support the headquarters and lied and said that they were in Gaza. We did send a lot of people to operational headquarters. There was, of course, the whole peer debacle, which I would say effectively brought U.S. troops to Gaza, or they were standing on a peer that touched Gaza. Then, of course, we have still 100 plus air defense soldiers who are in Southern Israel manning a strategic air defense battery.

Kelley Vlahos 
After you resigned, I really am curious about the reaction that you got from your fellow service members to your resignation because I know it must have been tough for Annelle, and we talked a little bit about this offline. But that space, the State Department, where you had a lot of people people who were really struggling because many of them had come from maybe a human rights background, a regional analyst, like civil rights, international law, but there may be a little tougher caliber of folk in the U.S. military. Were they like, “What are you doing? This is our job. What’s your problem?” What kind of reaction did you get?

Harrison Mann
Yeah. To start with that, I want to go back to what I was saying about feeling this cognitive dissonance of like, “Oh, my gosh, this tragedy is happening, and no one’s talking about it.” I thought maybe that’s because everybody was okay with it. I didn’t really know. I was afraid to ask. I published my resignation letter which I sent it around the office first, and then about a month later, I put it public. A lot of people got back to me with really supportive responses. A lot of these were civilians. I worked in an agency that was mostly civilians, but it wasn’t only civilians. I felt a little embarrassed that I hadn’t trusted some of these people before because I thought they were good people or good despite the job we were doing. To me, they were people I trusted.

I had other army officers, folks I hadn’t seen in years, reach out. I think it was that there’s a little bit of self-selection there. The haters probably did not; they didn’t, for the most part, bother to get in touch with me, but I can tell you there are people I know from the intel world and from uniformed arms services who were quite supportive. Hearing it from people I knew from the army meant a lot. I mean, it meant more, no offense to my other DIA friends, but that was something I was super scared about. One of the reasons I stayed quiet at work is I was really afraid of what especially some of the colonels and other senior folks who I respect and looked up to would do.

Kelley Vlahos 
Wow. I have a ton more questions, but I’m also trying to be mindful of the time and any Q&A that comes in. Now, you mentioned that you have gotten together with your fellow resignees. Is that how you term it? It’s like resignees, right? This sounds really awesome because you’re creating support for each other, but you can actually focus some of this positive energy. Can you talk a little bit about that group and where you are now in terms of the evolution from, “Hi, I just resigned. I’m fresh off this and the Biden administration, too. Where do you go from here, and how are you harnessing some of that energy together? 

Annelle Sheline
As I said, things do feel a little different now, and I’m happy to get into that as well in terms of USAID doesn’t exist anymore and people are losing their jobs right and left. While it has been really great to have the support of Harrison, Alex, and others in the group, I do think things feel somewhat different now, and I do expect that there will be more whistleblowers and people calling out ways that this administration is breaking the law, just as the Biden administration was, but it won’t be only about U.S. policy towards Gaza. It’s a whole range of things.

I just wanted to address a question that had come up about the notion of the odd relationship with Israel. My understanding to explain the nature of the relationship is the strength of the Israel lobby, is the power of very– this is something that Kelly, our colleague Eli, has written about and we’ll be writing more about, is the shift within the American Jewish community to which the Israel lobby used to be more closely tied. Then, in the aftermath of Citizens United and the ability of very wealthy individuals and actors to influence politics so much more that we’ve seen in the Israel lobby that is no longer really tied to the grassroots of the American Jewish community. Many of whom were strong advocates of civil rights. Many of whom have expressed discomfort, especially young people, with what Israel is doing and has been doing, but that the Israel lobby no longer is so beholden to that broader community and instead really tied to the interests of people like very wealthy donors like Miriam Adelson, for example, or just other extremely wealthy individuals who have such a grip not only on U.S.-Israel policy but things like the military-industrial complex or just so many other aspects of what drives our city here of Washington, D.C. Just to get to that answer, I do think that domestic politics and lobbying is really one of the core explanations for the nature of the U.S.. Of what we were terming this odd U.S.-Israel relationship.

Kelley Vlahos 
Harrison and Annelle– I know Annelle, you work with me. Harrison, you’re with DAWN and WIN Without War. Alex, what are your prospects? You get squeezed out of this job, and now all of the funding for probably the contracts that you would normally be working for seems to have dried up, too. Can you talk a little bit about what your personal and professional next steps are? It sounds like you have a lot of institutional experience, and we would love to have you out in the field, but is there any place that will have you right now? Or are there still jobs for the stuff that you do?

Alexander Smith
It’s a good question. I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that because it’s a bit embarrassing how– yeah, there’s not a lot going on right now. I’m doing some research here and there with Cambridge and with a few other groups, but I’m not yet able to get into a high-paid UN job. I think the UN is somewhat immune from the kinds of issues that would bar me from working in the U.S. again. That suits me because I don’t really have any desire to live in the U.S. in the near term. One thing I’m considering is doing a PhD, even though I already have three postgraduate degrees, because it would be something to do, and it’s something I’m passionate about. So, I submitted a research proposal to Oxford a few months ago to research crimes of deprivation under international law. Asking the question, can countries like Israel, are they more likely to get away with genocide if it’s done through infectious disease, starvation, deprivation, and not through bombs and bullets? As we know from other conflicts, you can kill four times or higher with non-kinetic strikes, things like starvation. That’s what I’d like to dedicate my time to.

Kelley Vlahos 
Let’s take, if we can, the Trump moment out of the equation. This is a tough question. I want to ask each of you, do you feel like what you did had any impact whatsoever on the policies? I will just stay with the Biden administration because that’s where you made your stand. Did it help? Were you left frustrated afterward? Were you expecting more people to do the same? Can you talk a little bit about that, the ups and downs? I’ll start with Annelle. 

Annelle Sheline
It had zero impact on the policy. I have heard from people similar to what Harrison was talking about, of hearing from people who I respected or people who I hadn’t heard from in years who reached out to say thank you. Certainly, there was some online hatred, but really less than I was expecting. I really thought that I was going to have to deal with a deluge of online harassment. Instead, I really had a lot of people express their appreciation. I have had people tell me it made a difference to the extent that people in the region, even people in Gaza, knowing that someone at the State Department had resigned– our colleague, our friend Josh Paul, was the first person to resign publicly, and he did so within weeks of October 7th. I just commend his courage for doing that at a moment when I think public opinion in the United States was really so much against that. Whereas by the time I resigned, I think there was, again, this sense of just desperation of what were we doing here that was manifested by Aaron Bushnell. So I don’t think it had any impact on the policy, but I hope that maybe, in the long run, it will have an impact on how all of this is remembered. Yeah. Insha’allah. 

Kelley Vlahos 
Harrison? 

Harrison Mann
Yeah. I will first say that if we fought a campaign and we were on the losing side, it doesn’t mean we were on the wrong side. I’m incredibly– I will always be proud of what side of this we’ve been on and continue to be on. Whether it changed the policy is an interesting question. Maybe not the three of us or the dozen of us. For better or worse, it’s undeniable that the large movement of Americans who opposed what we’re doing in Gaza, which we played a tiny role in, did change the policy. It had a big role in determining who the president was.

Kelley Vlahos 
That’s a great point.

Harrison Mann
I remain extremely skeptical about the current ceasefire deal, which we can see in quotations, given the violations from day one, where that deal is going to lead. Donald Trump did not decide what he even wanted– he thought at least it needed to look like he was making a peace deal in Gaza. That didn’t come out of nowhere. That came from domestic political pressure. This does not mean that I support his plans right now. It doesn’t mean I have a lot of confidence in them, but we were part of a change.

I don’t know what the future of American politics is going to look like, but our viewpoint is one that’s never going to be ignored again. I’m proud of that. It’s also just a very small consolation to know we were right.

Kelley Vlahos 
Yeah. 

Harrison Mann
I’ll say I, at least, and maybe the group collectively, have been a little bit quieter in some of our public activism since the election, but it was because we were desperately hoping that Biden and the Harris campaign would change tack on this issue so that they could win. I’m not going to speak for all 12 of us here, but that’s at least where I was coming from.

Kelley Vlahos 
Yeah. Alex, you were squeezed out of your job. You could have just kind of, like, you said, you could have reapplied into another position for another contractor, but you chose to go out and talk about it on the media, which brought a lot more attention to the cause that you were trying to highlight in your report and in your slideshow. Do you think that made any difference by taking this to a national audience?

Alexander Smith
Yes and no. As Annelle and Harrison have already said, I don’t think that me alone really makes much of a difference, but collectively, the 12 or 13 of us, plus, as Harrison said, all the people, the non-committed vote, the activists, the student protestors out on the campuses, raising their voices, all of us collectively will have an impact on the next cycle. I’d like to think that the next Democratic presidential candidate will hopefully understand that they can’t support genocide and get elected, that that’s a deal breaker for most people. You see that in the polling, 77% of Democrats oppose armed shipments to Israel. That’s an old poll. I’m sure it’s much higher than that now. Then the IMEU poll that came out just recently about the people who voted for Biden and then not for Harris. The number one reason was the genocide in Gaza. Even higher than the economy and the inflation problems. I would hope that all of us collectively can have an impact. Maybe, who knows, someday, the 12 of us will be involved in informing Jamaal Bowman’s presidential campaign on how to talk about Gaza, health care, human rights, and defense.

Kelley Vlahos 
I don’t really want to get into personalities, but I am going to because offline, we started to talk a little bit about Samantha Power. As you know, she made her name as a journalist covering the war in Bosnia. She wrote a book, A Problem From Hell, about Rwanda. The entire book was, “We need to take this on board, what happened in Rwanda. Make sure it never happens again. We should have intervened earlier and prevented that genocide.” Then fast forward to 2024, and as Annelle had pointed out in her resignation letter, the International Criminal Court has said that there’s plausible evidence that a genocide is happening in Israel. Now, Samantha Power is the leader of USAID and a very powerful member of the Biden administration. Has a seat on the National Security Council.

I don’t know who wants to speak first on this, but if Samantha Power was unable to stand up for what was right here, given her background and all of the credibility that she had stored up on this issue. What’s going on here? Could anybody have stood up if not her? What do you think that says, I guess, for the credibility of all of our other leaders who stand up and talk about human rights, international law, genocide, and prevention? This seems to have been quite a turning point moment in terms of the faith and the trust that we’ve had in leadership. Anybody want to jump in on that one?

Alexander Smith
Yeah, just really quickly. So, I want to correct that Samantha Power isn’t the head anymore. She was a political appointee, so her last day was the day before Trump’s inauguration.

Kelley Vlahos 
Yeah.

Alexander Smith
Yeah, but I liked to give her the benefit of the doubt that she thought that she was doing work to protect USAID’s budget by not talking about the genocide because she certainly knows that it’s a genocide. That was the best-case scenario, but the fact that she still hasn’t said anything now leads me to think that she’s simply a careerist who decided it was not in her best interest to talk about the genocide.

Kelley Vlahos 
Good point. 

Alexander Smith
But, yeah, it’s been a really revealing era. I’ve certainly had my eyes opened. I used to think that Joe Biden was a good man, essentially, and Kamala Harris and a lot of the Democrats who have completely capitulated and decided that their power, or perhaps they really believe that Israel is defending itself still. I think most of them just understand that going against Israel is not in their personal interest and have decided to take the coward’s path, but that’s been revelatory to me. I would hope that many Americans have had the same awakening that not just on Gaza, but on many issues, the Democratic Party simply doesn’t represent our interests.

Kelley Vlahos 
Annelle, can you imagine a time when you go to the bookstore and see the brand new book by Samantha Power about retelling her time in the Biden administration? I mean, is that even a prospect? I mean, or does she disappear into the mist of time? I mean, does she recover from this in terms of her credibility on this issue?

Annelle Sheline
I mean, another figure to highlight is Brett McGurk, who just started not only a gig at Harvard’s Belfer Center but also what I’m sure is a very lucrative job as a contractor. I’d have to look up specifically, but he and Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, all of these people, I think it’s really up to us and to the American people to determine to what extent these people are allowed to move through the world and face zero accountability. Thinking about the ways that the architects of the Iraq war were allowed to proceed, the war in Afghanistan, and the many other horrific military interventions the U.S. has been involved in.

Think about people Daniel Ellsberg, in whose honor we are gathered here today, and how he suffered as a result, but very few of the architects of the Vietnam War were ever held accountable for what was done. I also think of the decision by the Obama administration not to pursue some accountability or reckoning for what the Bush administration did or even to roll back things like the authorization for the use of military force, which we continue to operate under and which Trump is now using as a justification for potentially bombing cartels in Mexico. Somehow, that’s related to 9/11.

So, knowing that the centers of power are unlikely to hold other members of their circle accountable, it is up to the people. I do think that in an era of social media where people have the ability to share and spread information much more easily than was possible during the Vietnam era or even at the time of 9/11, it is more possible to maybe hold some of these people accountable or at least to not allow them to be able to– McGurk show up at a Harvard event and not face protesters. I very much hope that he does face a lot of protesters.

Kelley Vlahos 
Yeah. Harrison, I’m just thinking ahead. Having been in D.C. for a long time, I share the frustration with Annelle that a lot of these architects of our 20 years of war are running around and still sitting in front of a camera, getting accolades, invited to all sorts of panels, and writing books. Do you think it might be different in this case now? Okay, Iraq war, failure. Afghanistan was a failure, but in this short period of the Gaza conflict, nothing was resolved before these people were all tossed out after the election. They can’t even go back and say, “Well, we kept our heads down. We voiced our concerns privately with the Netanyahu government because we were able to achieve A, B, or C.” They didn’t achieve anything. It was the Trump administration that came in and got the ceasefire agreement. Do you think that they will be able to rehabilitate themselves, or are we really going to see a situation where they won’t be able to, we will hold them accountable, and the fact that they didn’t achieve anything by being so silent and by being so quietly complicit in the tragedy that we’ve seen unfold that it’s going to prevent them from moving ahead without checks? 

Harrison Mann
Morally, I don’t think these people deserve peace for the rest of their lives. Even the past year, I always hoped I’d run into them in D.C. somewhere so I could yell at them. It hasn’t happened yet. I may need to go to Le Diplomate more often. But as Annelle said, McGurk, and for those of you who don’t know, he was basically the number three man for Biden’s Gaza administration, already at Harvard Kennedy School, which I’m just going to point this out. I did my grad degree at the place that’s hosting Brett McGurk. While I was there, we had 96-year-old Henry Kissinger call in on Zoom to one of my classes. Is this time going to be different?

I honestly think it is. I was quite young during the invasion of Iraq. We didn’t have TikTok. The students on here are going to think that I’m ancient. There was no YouTube back then. We were probably bombing Baghdad in ways that are comparable to what Israel has done to Gaza. There was no footage of that. There was no way for a normal person, even a normal, concerned person, who opposed the war to have a visceral idea of the level of carnage that was happening from that war.

That’s different now. Everybody who’s interested, even people who aren’t interested, is deeply affected by this. I think also maybe different from Iraq is there was not even really a strong case from this administration that any of this was a good idea, which at least, I don’t want to say give them credit, the Bush administration Administration tried very hard to make a case that invading Iraq was a good idea, and there were a lot of supposedly reasonable people who were quite excited about that prospect in 2002 and 2003. I don’t think that was replicated this time at all, and even the position that this was a good idea, I don’t know if it was the minority, but even in a media that was quite sympathetic to Israel, you didn’t see, I’d say, that level of support. I think clearly, they’re going to get hired. I think they know they need to keep their heads down in a way that perhaps some of the architects of the Iraq War did not feel they needed to.

Kelley Vlahos 
Let me ask you, what’s next? I’d love to hear what each of you would hope to be doing in the next chapter, whether it’s writing or advocating. I know what Annelle does because I work with her, but where do you see that you can be of assistance? Now that you’re out there, you’ve gotten followings and people are listening to what you have to say. Can you talk a little bit? Maybe I’ll start with you, Harrison, because I’m really curious as a former military, where do you see that you’re most needed right now? What will you be doing in this space?

Harrison Mann
Yeah. I mean, I would say the Gaza conflict has clearly followed us home. I don’t mean me personally, though it has, but as a country. It is one of the causes of the awful changes that are happening domestically right now. I think it’s going to be very hard to find any of the solutions that we hope for in the Middle East or anywhere abroad until we come to some resolution. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but the dismantling of the government that’s happening right now.

I think Annelle, Alexander, and everybody else who resigned shared this with me that we felt like we needed– something was wrong, and we needed to use the limited tools at our disposal to do something, even if it was just talking about it, which was all we felt we could do. I’m still looking for what that solution is for the series of crises that we’re in now. In my current job at Win Without War, the big project that I’m doing next week is an event that’s meant to convince Congress to understand why it’s a bad idea if we bomb cartels in Mexico because that’s something that’s on the table now.

I feel even that is the least of our worries. I think the people who are on this call are probably people of conscience and people who care deeply about what happens around the world and what the United States does around the world. I don’t think we should stop caring about that. As Annelle mentioned earlier, I’m still very mad about Brett McGurk, and I will do what I can to hold these people accountable. I’m not losing sight of that amidst everything else that’s happening. I think I, personally, am going to have to look closer to home and about what I can do in my community if the other levers of power that are meant to protect me are not working.

Kelley Vlahos 
Alex, we have a president who declared a few weeks ago that he wants to clear out Gaza and rebuild Gaza. Palestinians may be able to come back or not, given what day he’s talking about it. Some people believe he was just pressuring the Arab nations in the neighborhood to rebuild it themselves, and he’s basically threatening them. Let’s just say that he helps Israel initiate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza as a policy. What are your thoughts about whether or not there is an architecture of opposition that would be capable of jumping in at this time? I mean, we spent a year trying to stop what was going on in, or more than a year, in Gaza. People had to quit. You were squeezed out of your job. Now, everybody’s out of a job who is working in this realm. Do we have what it takes to put pressure on the Trump administration to not engage in a disastrous policy of that kind? I mean, wow, did he just wipe out all the people that could be properly opposing such policies?

Alexander Smith
Yeah. To be clear, the policy that he’s proposing, it’s been really disappointing to see it described in the media as a bold plan or describing Trump’s plan to get all the people out of Gaza. These are crimes in international law. When I was in law school, I took courses in IHO and then briefly worked at the ICC, so forcible transfer is a crime under the IV Geneva Convention and also the ICC statute. I have a slightly more optimistic point of view, and it’s probably because of my geography. I’m not in the U.S., and so I don’t think of the U.S. as the Alpha and Omega, the be-all and end-all of everything.

We have seen slow-moving, but positive signs from Europe in the sense that when the ICJ in July of last year, not the genocide case, but the occupation case said that Israel’s occupation is illegal, that it needs to be dismantled, reparations need to be paid, and that any third country has a duty to not support the occupation in any way. That was a very bold decision from the ICJ. When it came up at the General Assembly, a surprising number of countries voted for it, Australia for the first time. It’s never recognized, the Palestinian statehood before voted for that resolution. Every EU country, except for Czechia and Hungary, either voted for it or abstained from it, including Germany, which was quite remarkably abstained. We are seeing some steps towards real pressure, not from the U.S., but from other countries that could have an impact. If the EU changes– if they end their trade with Israel, that’s a third of Israel’s economy. So that could actually force an end to not just the genocide in Gaza, but the occupation as well.

Maybe I’m being a bit naive and optimistic, but I also take some consolation from the fact that from the first bill in the U.S. Congress to isolate South Africa during Apartheid, it took something like 14 or 15 years for that to actually take effect. If you think of Bernie Sanders bill to stop funding Israel as a similar thing. We might be in for a very long and frustrating journey, but I think eventually things will turn. Based on the politics of young people today, I think it’s inevitable that it will eventually turn in favor of justice.

Kelley Vlahos 
Now, what do you think about the international response, and particularly the UN? In my mind, I felt just a bit disappointed. I realized that all the levers are there to try to enforce international law but without the buy-in from the United States. With Israel just saying, “Well, we’re not a party to this, and we’re not doing anything wrong, so just shove it.” How do you feel today about the powers of the United Nations and the international community in creating some shared norms and enforcing them when we have what we have going on in Gaza, and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it? I know there’s some hope, like Alex has said, that at some point, those pressures will come to bear. But in terms of the immediacy, the UN passed a few– was it two major resolutions, and there’s been no change? 

Annelle Sheline
Yeah. This speaks to something a lot of people have been asking in the Q&A, and one of which I tried to answer. Essentially, the UN is functioning as it was designed to do, which is to prevent World War III. It’s supposed to make sure that a major power is not going to turn to war in order to pursue its objectives. Thus far, we have not had World War III, luckily. I do think that the war on Gaza has demonstrated a global hunger to reform these institutions and to rethink things like the power of the UN Security Council, in particular, veto, and the very limited membership of countries. And just thinking more broadly, the demographic trends, the membership of who has this veto power on the UN Security Council no longer reflects the reality of humanity. I do think that there’s pressure building for reform of that, but it will continue to have this inherent tension between wanting to prevent another conflict on the scale of something like World War II or what would be worse because it would be a nuclear confrontation and achieving justice and accountability, which the UN was not designed to do.

I do think that before all of this, I was aware of the ICC, I was aware of the ICJ. I couldn’t have told you much about them. I couldn’t have told you much about human rights law. I do think that it has really made it so much more salient. People are looking this up. They have a much better understanding of what these institutions are. At least they’ve heard of them. I think it has contributed to this demand for rethinking the fact that this rogue state empowered by a superpower could carry out genocide in full view of the entire world, documented by its own soldiers I certainly don’t think that would happen under this administration. But I do think that whether the U.S. wants to lead on that process or whether the U.S. will be dragged, kicking and screaming, or if we’ll end up in such a bifurcated system where you do have countries like China, Russia, other countries that decide they don’t actually want to be part of any global system anymore, and you have Europe and maybe the U.S. and others, maybe Israel continuing to play by these other rules.

My hope is moving forward that, there will continue to be some kind of international governance structure that all countries would view as sufficiently legitimate that they would want to be part of it. Regarding your point about how we strengthen these norms of human rights, I think, in many ways, the norm of human rights protection remains strong because people keep talking about it. People are outraged by what’s been done. So, I do think that although it is horrifying to observe the ways in which it has not been protected, I do think that it has reified for many people the horrors of when a population is treated as subhuman in such a public way.

Kelley Vlahos 
Yeah, I guess the other fear is that other countries or other nations will not feel inhibited from just doing whatever they want because they look at Israel and the United States and others and say, “Well, there really wasn’t any accountability. Like the UN couldn’t actually enforce these laws.” You could have an era where it’s to each its own, so to speak, and they follow the rules when they want, and they break them when it’s convenient to them. It’s very difficult. I think that’s where a lot of the disappointment with our government comes in because we had always held ourselves up to a standard that we were the indispensable nation, the beacon of light, whatever cliché you want to throw in there.

But it seemed that was the one thing that had united Americans in thinking that, particularly after World War II, we were a force for good. Then, in creating the United Nations, we’re able to build this community of like-minded countries. When we saw the weakest and the meekest being exploited and civilians succumbing in times of war and being victimized, that there would be somebody to stand up for them, that’s clearly not happening in this case because of this special relationship and our choosing to be-

Annelle Sheline
I would jump in just to say, the United States has committed atrocities. You think about Vietnam.

Kelley Vlahos 
Oh, yeah, absolutely [crosstalk 01:21:36]. We’ve kept up the façade, though, for as long as we possibly could. I personally think that what’s happened in the last two and a half years has just blown it out of the water for good. I feel like we have maintained the fiction for as long as we possibly could, and now it’s just like there’s just no going back, I don’t think. I don’t think anybody believes.

I’m a big critic of the mainstream media. How do each of you feel the major media and its coverage of Gaza and the war crimes, the atrocities, the starvation, everything has contributed to the unaccountability of Israel on this front? What role did they play in allowing the U.S. government to turn a blind eye for as long as it did? I realized the election was a check, but it certainly wasn’t the media, do you think? I think they allowed this to prolong. Harrison?

Okay. Alex looked like he wanted to say something. It’s a very important question, and I want to preface this by saying that from the start, there have been journalists who’ve been trying to do the right thing, and I know some of them. The same fight that Alex was having at USAID, they were having inside their newsrooms to try and get the headline on the article they wrote changed from “five 14-year-old Gazan women die mysteriously” to “Israeli airstrike kills four children.” That being said, the editors, the people running these papers, overwhelmingly misled and obfuscated the extent of the war, the causes of the war, and the level of devastation. It was very frustrating to see.

I think it matters very much because the people who depend on the New York Times, the Atlantic, or something, or some of these publications for their news, are sometimes important people, the people who can influence their representatives or influence some of our elected leaders. I will see if Annelle or Alex, have friends who are in the journalism business, but people have been quite explicit to me about them having to fight to spit out an article that bears a semblance to the actual sequence of events that happened when the Israeli military killed a lot of civilians. I will just mention one. It was very complicit collectively, unfortunately, in what’s happened.

Kelley Vlahos 
Alex, were you going to say something, and I cut you off?

Alexander Smith
No, I was just reflecting on the question. I’ve never seen anything like what we’re seeing today in terms of just complete irresponsibility on the part of mainstream media and sources that I used to trust, like BBC and NPR. It used to be my passion for truth. But, to see them dropping the ball, dehumanizing Palestinians, parroting IDF talking points without any critical thought whatsoever. The human shields thing, for example. We’ve been hearing this excuse from Israel for decades. Human Rights Watch did a very good report in 2006 on the claim of human shields in Lebanon and found that there was zero evidence for that. So, if a journalist ever heard that term and decided to interrogate it, they might find that it’s a lie today as well. But those claims are never interrogated. They just say, “It’s true,” or they say, “Israel says this, and Palestinians say this.” It was very disappointing to see the many Palestinian journalists who are on the ground reporting on what’s happening to them firsthand being ignored. You would see people say there are no journalists in Gaza. They mean there are no foreign journalists, but there are journalists.

As Harrison said, you can see that battle taking place in some institutions like the New York Times, which is famous above all others for dehumanizing headlines where they will say some Palestinians died when they have been intentionally targeted and killed. Yet, the New York Times came out with, I think, the best article I’ve seen in the last year, which was 65 physicians just talking about going to Gaza, what they saw firsthand, how many of them saw children shot in the head, how many of them saw people being starved to death. So, there certainly is a battle going on. I wish there were more bravery within media organizations, but we haven’t really seen that in mass.

Kelley Vlahos 
Especially when you consider how many journalists have been killed, and that’s completely ignored. I mean, you’ll see a throwaway line here and there in the mainstream press, quoting the number, but there doesn’t seem to be the outrage you would think from the Fourth Estate here, which is usually pretty focused on itself. That’s been ignored, as well as the banning of Al Jazeera from both Gaza and the West Bank. An entire news organization, the best news organization on the ground there, has been banned. You barely hear a word about that here in the United States. Now, what do you think about the media coverage? Do you have some mixed feelings, too, about how well they’ve been doing or how much?

Annelle Sheline
I think the mainstream media has been a crucial factor in the manufacture of consent. It’s part of– they’ve recognized that the move to ban TikTok reflected the fact that it was radicalizing young people against Israel and in favor of ending the genocide. That being said, a friend of mine lost his job at the Wall Street Journal because he refused to continue to toe the line that was required. I know that’s been the case for many journalists. In general, the fact that I noticed in my op-ed at the time, I think 90 journalists had been killed as of last March, and now I think it’s 194. At the time, when I noted that, it was more than had been killed in any other conflict since records of journalist deaths. It’s more than doubled since then.

I do think it’s fairly atrocious, the fact that mainstream media outlets have not been calling out the way that journalists have been targeted. Similarly, healthcare workers are being targeted and humanitarian workers are being directly targeted by Israel. That being said, I did just see that I was unaware of this, but there were Doctors Against Genocide who just staged a big protest today in Congress demanding this administration change its policies on Gaza.

I do think that it’s this and other issues that are contributing to the undermining of trust in media. I mean, this certainly didn’t start with Gaza, but it did not help that issue. As someone mentioned in the chat, now this administration is trying to go after media organizations simply for doing their job, not in any way drawing attention to what’s happening to Palestinians. I think we’re running out of time here, but I appreciate all the questions that people have been asking, and I’ve been trying to get to some of them.

Kelley Vlahos 
Well, I know there was a question about how we can magnify the voices of the resignees. I think that’s fairly important because I know this is an ongoing conversation. I know, Harrison, you’re on X, Annelle you’re on X, you have a great following. Where can people follow you and then amplify your work? If you’re publishing, know when you’re going to be on a media hit or whatever. Can you each use maybe a final word on where we can keep up with you?

Harrison Mann
I’m rapidly looking up what my Twitter handle is for somebody who asked that.

Kelley Vlahos 
Harrison_j_man.

Harrison Mann
Yes. One of you has the opportunity to become my 342nd follower.

Kelley Vlahos 
Let’s get him 304,000 tonight.

Alexander Smith
I’m so not tech-savvy, and I never joined Twitter. I’m happy to say. I am on Instagram and just put my handle in the chat. It’s alexin1derland123.

Kelley Vlahos 
That’s nice. Annelle.

Annelle Sheline
[inaudible 01:31:25] I’m still seeing people have been saying they’ve deactivated their X accounts. I’m not yet on BlueSky, but you can also follow my work just at the Quincy Institute. In particular, this is not something that Harrison, Alex, and I are directly involved in, but our colleagues, Josh and Tarek, have launched an organization called A New Policy to try to push for a new approach to Israel that is grounded in actual U.S. interests and not in simply pursuing the interests of Netanyahu. Certainly, look up their work. They’re doing really exciting stuff. I appreciate the work that all of you are doing, hopefully in your own communities to talk to people and to talk about these issues. Sharing on social media is part of how this issue got so much more attention than it had initially. Your social media shares might feel small, but they do have an impact.

Kelley Vlahos 
I feel bad because I saw a couple of questions that I hadn’t seen before. One of them seems there’s a couple that gets to the same theme. Maybe I can re-indulge and just have one extra minute here, like on a lightning run? But how do you know when to stay and fight and when it’s time to resign? That’s a great question. Some people are like, “Well, why don’t you just stay and try to change things from within?” I want to ask Annelle that question. I know you’ve thought about it.

Annelle Sheline
Someone asked this about the dissent cables. I co-authored a dissent cable. I signed two others. There’s not a lot of transparency, so if I’d been aware of more, I would have been happy to sign all the cables. But Blinken himself acknowledged that he’s received dozens of cables about Gaza, which is, to my knowledge, more than about any other issue in such a short time frame. There are certainly channels for internal dissent, at least at State. Having been involved in those efforts after about six months, it was just clear that nothing was changing. I think, personally, it seemed that the only way to try to effectuate any kind of change was to renounce the policy publicly.

Kelley Vlahos 
Harrison?

Harrison Mann
Yeah, I’m glad you brought up that question because I saw it in the chat, and I think about that a lot, too. I think you have to be honest with yourself. Are you implementing the policy that you disagree with or not? You might be in a position where you’re genuinely putting sand in the gears or pushing against it. Other friends or colleagues I confronted always gave this answer. It’s like, “Well, if I leave, somebody worse is going to be in my job.” I was like, “But you’re in your job right now, and you’re still doing the Israel support.” I think you know when you’ve made a good faith effort or if a good faith effort is even possible. I did less than Alex. I was totally hopeless that I could even do anything. If you’re waiting for that moment to come when somebody else tells you to stop, it’s not going to happen.

Kelley Vlahos 
Yeah, that’s a good point. I like the analogy with the sand and the gears. If you’re not able and you’re not putting sand in the gears, what are you doing then but enabling whatever’s happening? I guess I’ll leave it on that, and I’ll leave it on a note from the anonymous attendee who said that Daniel Ellsberg partly caused the end of the Vietnam War. All three of you have played a role in the eventual end of the Israel-Hamas war. Thank you. I thank you very much for all of your candid responses tonight and for being who you are. I hope to see your faces again at some point and to work with all of you. I know I work with Annelle, and I see her lovely face every day, but hey, too.

Christian Appy
Yeah.