Biden Admin Lies About U.S. Military in Israel

U.S. military disappeared webpage about Army unit in Israel

(Credit: U.S. Army)

In its latest war powers report to Congress, the White House has omitted any reference to Israel, concealing the fact that military personnel are permanently deployed in the country. The report, required to be submitted every 6 months, is supposed to keep the American people informed about the deployment of U.S. troops who might face combat.

The omission is just one of several by the Biden administration, which seems intent on obscuring its role in the perpetual war on terror and other military adventures overseas. The report, released on Friday to virtually no media coverage, details U.S. military deployments to regions as obscure as the Lake Chad Basin. But it says nothing whatsoever about the U.S. military presence in Israel amid the obvious dangers associated with Israel’s war in Gaza and Iranian missile strikes.

The U.S. military has had a number of military facilities in Israel for decades, including an air and missile defense element — the 13th Missile Defense Battery — that was assigned to the country in 2016 (and is stationed at “Site 512” as well as other locations). The U.S. presence in the country has always been considered sensitive; for decades, the U.S. has stored arms and other war materiel on the ground in Israel (for U.S. use in the defense of Israel). These various warehouses and compounds are secreted behind other innocuous names – Site 51, Site 53, Site 64. 

Established during the Obama administration, the 13th was meant to coordinate with Israel in thwarting an Iranian long-range missile attack. Before the Hamas attack on October 7, the deployment of the 13th wasn’t strictly secret. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin shouted them out in a December post on X (formerly Twitter). The Pentagon also published  a photo of former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper meeting with the unit in 2020. And then there’s the Pentagon photo taken that year of the unit’s commander and four other troops standing at attention in a location identified as “Israel.” The battery has a Facebook and Instagram page, and has even celebrated “our Israeli Air Force partners and the 678th Air Defense Artillery Brigade command team.” Neither has posted anything since October 7.

Now, in its own disinformation program to obscure the presence of combat troops in the country, the 13th Battery has pretty much disappeared from the Pentagon’s website. To be clear, the unit is still in Israel. But the U.S. Army’s official webpage for the 10th Air and Missile Defense Command (its higher headquarters) has even removed a tab dedicated to the 13th, leading to a webpage for the unit that was available as recently as March of last year, according to the Wayback Machine.

See for yourself in the screenshots below.

2023 Army webpage for the 13th Missile Defense Battery (via Wayback Machine)

Current Army webpage with tab for the 13th Missile Defense Battery removed

I guess the unit’s webpage is another casualty of the Israel-Hamas war. 

And for no good reason. While secrecy apologists will say military units need to be concealed for “operational security,” the presence of the unit is also meant to be a “deterrent” to Iran (and was involved in responding to Iran’s drone and missile attack on Israel in April). So much for deterrence. 

No one can really make an argument that  the Iranians don’t know about the unit. Iran’s intelligence doesn’t need a public webpage to know about U.S. forces operating in Israel. So the only ones who are kept in the dark are  the American people, who don’t have the luxury of an intelligence service (or a functional and informative news media) to tell them what’s going on. Americans who, poll after poll demonstrates, care deeply about what’s happening in Israel and their government’s role in it.

Biden’s war powers report omits reference to Israel not to protect us from the Iranians, but to protect himself from us.

No one in Congress has raised any issue about this, perhaps because it doesn’t affect them. For as the war powers report notes, “a classified annex to this report provides further information” that presumably includes Israel. Information available to members of Congress but not to ordinary people. 

"The Biden administration has not publicly explained how it squares US military operations like those associated with the Gaza pier or the defense of Israel from a fusillade of Iranian drones and missiles with the War Powers Resolution,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and expert on war powers, who now serves as senior advisor at the International Crisis Group, told me. “They've been able to maintain this silence thus far due to the lack of sustained pushback from Congress."

It’s pretty rich that the same elite types who lament the public not being more politically informed have nothing at all to say when the government deprives them of information necessary to be informed. 

Political apathy isn’t an accident any more than health insurance claims being a confusing mess is an accident. It’s the end result of a million little things Washington does to make learning about the government’s conduct seem not worth the time. And by “Washington,” I don’t just mean officialdom. Keeping the public apathetic is a team effort involving not just a secretive White House and checked-out Congress, but a derelict media as well. As far as I can tell, there wasn’t a single news article about the war powers report. Not just about the report’s omission of Israel, but any mention of it all. 

The War Powers Act was passed in 1973, amid the Vietnam war, after Congress overrode a veto by then-President Richard Nixon. Like the Act, the war powers report is intended to be an important check on the President, preventing war without the consent of Congress. Surely the biannual report merits at least as much coverage as Hunter Biden’s conviction, which seems to have consumed the entire news cycle today. Become a paid subscriber so I can keep going over the reports the news media refuses to cover. Becoming an unpaid subscriber helps too!

— Edited by William M. Arkin