The US is reported to have made more than 100 weapons sales to Israel, including thousands of bombs, since the start of the war in Gaza, but the deliveries escaped congressional oversight because each transaction was under the dollar amount requiring approval.
“This doesn’t just seem like an attempt to avoid technical compliance with US arms export law, it’s an extremely troubling way to avoid transparency and accountability on a high-profile issue,” Ari Tolany, director of the security assistance monitor at the Centre for International Policy thinktank, said.
She added that, in exploiting the loophole, the Biden administration was following the steps of its predecessor. “They’re very much borrowing from the Trump playbook to dodge congressional oversight,” Tolany said.
In defending its continued arms sales to Israel, despite ever more public misgivings about its conduct of the Gaza war, the administration has argued that they are part of the US’s basic commitment to Israel’s self defence.
Okay, so when you say secret, you’re talking about an estimate based on publicly available numbers?
You would like publicly available numbers to estimate a dollar amount for 100 arm sales for sales to Israel since October 7th? But we’ll call it a secret?
Got it.
That “secret”(shhh) number is:
14 million threshold multiplied by another estimate of 100 secret(shhh) below the threshold sales
Stick with me here, but we’re going to take that publicly available 14000000 and then we’re going to add two of those big circle things. Those are the zeros from the 100 estimated sales.
So we get 1400000000(whoa, look at all those circles!), or 1.4 billion dollars in estimated arms sales to Israel below the
5 months, an estimated 1.4 billion dollars in arms sales to Israeli from the US below the Congressional notification threshold in the past 5 months.
Phew!
It took you 3 hours of questions and me 1 minute to find the publicly available estimates(five to type this), but thank goodness we got it done.
What an incredibly not meaningless number that is totally significant and we can draw conclusions from, especially in the middle of a conflict we don’t know the resolution of that incorporates so many other factors and so much complexity.
Good thing we got your big circle number on deck.