CIA Director Increasingly Supplanting 'Neocon' Blinken in Gaza Diplomacy - Analyst

Meanwhile, the advocacy group Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit against Joe Biden, accusing the US president of “failure to prevent genocide” of Palestinians.

Labor attorney and human rights activist Dan Kovalik joined Sputnik’s Political Misfits crew Tuesday to discuss the ongoing crisis in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip.

As a fragile ceasefire of hostilities continues, Washington has reportedly been working behind the scenes to secure the release of captives and facilitate negotiations in Qatar. Increasingly, one Biden administration figure has been playing a key role in US statecraft.

“The irony of ironies is that [William] Burns, who’s the head of the CIA, actually has much more of a diplomatic temperament than [Antony] Blinken does,” said Kovalik, claiming that Biden’s Secretary of State has taken a backseat in secret negotiations regarding the Palestine-Israel conflict.

“Blinken’s a neocon. And in terms of what’s happening in Ukraine and in what’s happening in Gaza, he’s extreme, and has really tended to do things to increase the chance for conflict rather than the opposite.”

Secretary of State Blinken has a relationship with Biden going back decades, making him one of the closest members of the White House cabinet to the current president. But host John Kiriakou suspects the career diplomat is “in over his head” on matters relating to Israel.

“Burns is a man of action,” Kiriakou claimed, to which Kovalik agreed before adding: “Burns has been a much more calm and considered diplomat.”

“He’s been a voice of reason,” continued Kovalik, noting Burns’ past recognition that Ukraine joining NATO “would be a red line for Russia that we don’t want to cross.”

President Biden elevated the Central Intelligence Agency director to a cabinet-level position earlier this year, representing the increasing importance of the controversial agency.

The CIA’s often underhanded practices were once highly controversial in the United States, famously culminating in the Senate Church Committee hearings in 1975. The inquiry uncovered a plethora of abuses committed by the agency, including the MKULTRA human experimentation program, support for the Chilean coup against Salvador Allende, and domestic spying and infiltration of civil rights groups.

Since then the CIA’s tactics have increasingly been adopted by other government agencies such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. When former President Donald Trump made ex-CIA director Mike Pompeo his secretary of state, it seemed to imply a complete merger between the secretive government body and America’s public-facing foreign policy establishment.

Biden’s reliance on Burns may provide him with an expanded toolset in the United States’ increasingly unpopular support for Israel’s military incursion, but it could also risk damaging Biden’s long-term reputation, which Kovalik noted is already at risk after the announcement of support for sending unlimited supplies of US weapons to Israel.

“At a time that israel is being credibly accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing and war crimes, Biden is going out of his way to make sure that none of the above will be an impediment to them getting weapons,” said Kovalik. “He’s already going to be remembered for dead children in Gaza.”

In other news relating to Israel, hosts John Kiriakou and Michelle Witte discussed revelations regarding Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who reportedly confessed to knowing little about the Palestine-Israel conflict as he pledged to repeat pro-Israel talking points in exchange for the lobby’s support in his primary campaign last year.

The then-Pennsylvania Attorney General confessed that he’s “not really a progressive in that sense” of criticizing Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Meanwhile, Cindy McCain, the wife of former US Senator John McCain, has weighed in on Gaza’s humanitarian crisis from her position as executive director of the World Food Program.

McCain recently said the besieged territory is “on the brink of famine,” which will result in the spread of disease and deepen the suffering of Palestinians.