Matt Miller, White House spokesperson, lies from the podium to justify cuts to UNRWA
In a press briefing Monday, in his official capacity as a representative of the White House, Matt Miller blatantly lied.
He did this while ostensibly correcting his previous sentence, one that had received pushback in the form of a request for clarification. That is to say, Miller had been granted space to amend his words — loose, at best — to be in accordance with the truth; instead, he chose to traipse down the primrose path of falsity and fraud.
Matt Miller, State Department spokesperson, not only misrepresented reality in recent remarks regarding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (better known as UNRWA), but when given the chance to clarify his statement Miller provided not a correction but a falsehood delivered as a correction.
With actual malice, Miller counterfeited reality from the White House podium.
Reporter: [Some] have condemned an Israeli Knesset attempt — or a bill, actually — to label UNRWA as a terrorist organization. Do you condemn this attempt by the Israeli Knesset to do that?
Miller: So I am not — I was not aware of that vote. Obviously we do not believe UNRWA is a terrorist organization. There were members of UNRWA who UNRWA had provided evidence had participated in some way in the attacks of October 7th. But that is not actions by UNRWA the body itself. So that’s our general position, but I can’t speak to the specific vote. I’m not familiar with anything specific.
Reporter: I want you to clarify this: UNRWA has provided evidence that some members were part — ?
Miller: So, I should say ‘provide’ — they briefed us on evidence that they found, at the beginning of this. I’ve gone through this a few times.
At the beginning of this entire issue with regard to UNRWA, a lot of people think it was [that] we took the action that we took to suspend UNRWA’s funding because of something the Israeli government told us, and that’s not the case. It was UNRWA that came to us and said they were aware of these allegations, they had looked into them [and] found evidence that certain members of UNRWA had participated in the attacks of October 7th and so had suspended and fired — 13 or 14, I don’t remember the exact number now. And that’s why we took the action that we did.
It was UNRWA that came to us and said they were aware of these allegations, they had looked into them [and] found evidence that certain members of UNRWA had participated in the attacks of October 7th[.]
It was such a staggering lie that I had to go back into the official record as it stands in the press, because what he said was at such odds with reality I had to ensure I had not fundamentally missed a key moment in this timeline.
No, Matt Miller is just gaslighting the rest of us.
That he’s doing so with the imprimatur of the White House means that Miller is lying in his official capacity. By extension, we can’t trust anything Miller says from that podium, and possibly we cannot trust anything any White House spokesperson says on this (or even any other) topic. Right now, the White House is endorsing lies — just flat-wrong information.
This is dangerous because, as I’m sure Miller and his counterparts know, the use of the podium — decked with the Seal of the Office of the President (or, in this case, the State Department) — furnishes a unique amphitheater: simply occupying that location amplifies what is spoken there. To proliferate untruths, half-truths, deceptions or lies from that placement of position is to misrepresent reality at its root, because so many take what emanates from the White House podium as representative of reality on the ground.
Miller has proven himself to be the verbal equivalent of a hall of mirrors, distortion reflected in his words.
On January 26, 2024 — within hours of the International Court of Justice officially stating that Palestinians were plausibly at risk of genocide as a result of Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip — the United States announced that it was suspending aid to UNRWA, the U.N.-backed agency that provides lifesaving support to Palestinians, notably in the form of food assistance.1
This is especially pertinent, as it was already known in December 2023 that Gazans were facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity. In short, people were already beginning to starve.
In the wake of the move by the US, more than a dozen donor countries, mostly Western countries, withdrew funding as well.
On a cursory search, I found an article in the Jerusalem Post from January 30, 2024, that seemed to back a portion of Miller’s claims. The article states two items of relevance:
“We haven’t had the ability to investigate [the allegations] ourselves, but they are highly, highly credible,” [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken told reporters in Washington.
Blinken said that UNRWA had reported to the US on the situation and that he found it “deeply, deeply troubling.”2
Yet this may be an ‘and’, not an ‘or’. That is to say, it’s possible that the UN notified the White House of these claims and that Israel did as well, somewhat after the fact. How else could Blinken describe the allegations as “highly, highly credible” unless Israel (or possibly the intel apparatus of another country) had vouched for the claims?
Upon finding the above, I sought fuller remarks by Blinken and found them at Forbes Breaking News, which had video of the presser where Blinken made the above comments.
Blinken: I had a very good conversation with Secretary General of the United Nations [António] Guterres last week where we were first made aware of these allegations, and we’re going to be looking very hard at the steps that UNRWA takes again to make sure that this is fully and thoroughly investigated, that there’s clear accountability, and that necessary measures are put into place so that this doesn’t happen again, assuming the allegations are fully borne out. Certainly we’ve not had — we haven’t had the ability to investigate them ourselves, but they are highly, highly credible.”
Assuming the allegations are fully borne out.
Allegations are not evidence.
(But note Blinken’s construction of his answer: it presupposes that the allegations are true and so confers that sense via subtext to the audience.)
Indeed, the move by the US took the UN by surprise. Vox, reporting on the issue January 31, highlighted remarks from a statement issued by Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA Commissioner General:
“It is shocking to see a suspension of funds to the Agency in reaction to allegations against a small group of staff, especially given the immediate action that UNRWA took by terminating their contracts and asking for a transparent independent investigation.”3
Lazzarini4 went on to “[refer] to the decision to pause funding as ‘collective punishment’ against Palestinians in a post on X,” according to Vox.
Further reporting by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) on February 7 noted,
“UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma said the agency acted to fire the staff immediately because of the seriousness and timing of the allegations — not because it had credible evidence against [the employees]. . . . She said the firings were intended to reassure donor nations and forestall drastic actions.
“The U.S. responded to the allegations by cutting funding immediately, although U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged that it was relying on Israel’s word alone.”5
That puts the lie to just about everything that came out of Matt Miller’s mouth Monday.
As it happened, by the time the CBC article was released, the dossier that addressed these allegations — indeed an Israeli product — had been obtained by Channel 4 News in the UK. CBC stated,
“Channel Four reported that the dossier [which Israel had shared with the UK government] was only six pages long. The news service said it rehashes long-standing Israeli government complaints about UNRWA and alleges the involvement of UNRWA staff in the Oct 7 attack but ‘provides no evidence’ to back up Israel’s explosive allegations against the agency.
“Britain’s Sky News also reviewed the dossier and reached a similar conclusion: ‘The Israeli intelligence documents make several claims that Sky News has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA,’ the news channel reported.”
As things stand, the investigation has borne no fruit of evidence,6 Israel has declined to provide any proof, and some donor countries have restored funding in the wake of the lack of substantiation. However, the US passed into law a provision in the latest government funding package that funding for UNRWA will remain suspended7 until at least 2025.8
Possibly no proof has been forthcoming because the information about these accused UNRWA employees was extracted under interrogation — torture, in other words.
Reuters reported that Touma, the UN spokesperson, submitted a report in March wherein she detailed that
several UNRWA Palestinian staffers had been detained by the Israeli army, and added that the ill-treatment and abuse they said they had experienced included severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members.9
Earlier this year when this story first broke, the detail about extraction via torture trailed the initial discussion, so the fact didn’t figure prominently. However, in the months since, we have had exposés, notably by CNN and other venues, that have delineated the state of Palestinian detainees kept in draconian, sadistic conditions.
People will say anything to get torture to stop, whatever the torturer wants to hear. Indeed, this is why information obtained under torture is unreliable.10
If the UN employees who were tortured by Israel in its pursuit of obtaining these statements encountered conditions such as what have been described at Sde Teiman, for example, then it is clear that the very basis of these allegations that triggered the US to rescind funding was ill-gotten, corrupt at its earliest stage.
Nothing obtained under torture should have formed the basis of any US policy, especially in the face of a burgeoning famine — a famine initiated by Israel itself.
So let’s recap.
Israel, which has long desired to rid itself of UNRWA, tortured UN employees in an attempt to secure these “confessions” about possible links between UNRWA workers and the October 7th attacks.
Israel then used these torture-based extractions to create dossiers of information, one of which was forwarded to the United Nations.
António Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, took these concerns to the U.S. (while preemptively firing these employees out of an extreme abundance of caution).
Israel provided these dossiers to the UK; there is every reason to presume Israel provided the same to the U.S.
Then, and only then, the U.S. halted funding, triggering a wave of rescission across multiple Western nations.
Everything boils down to Israel’s fruit of the poisoned tree. And Matt Miller had the nerve to stand at his lectern and tell the American public — indeed, the world — that it was UNRWA that provided evidence to the United States that brought about this whole cascade. No, Israeli leaders used a rumor mill to kill what to them are a pesky and pertinacious people.
Up until recently, I’d always looked upon White House press briefings as pro forma. You’re going to get standard ledes, clarifications, certainly a little bit of boilerplate. Some people have cynically called the place a spin room, an appellation that goes back decades (particularly with reference to Reagan’s era). But I have never seen such brazen lies as what Miller declared from his official podium on Monday.
There’s no other way to say it: Miller is an out-and-out liar. A liar-in-state. And he’s getting paid to lie to us.
Several people, myself included, wondered if the timing of this announcement was to distract from the ICJ ruling. That suspicion remains unanswered and outstanding. For an example, see this conversation between Pascal Lottaz (host of Neutrality Studies) and Saul Takahashi as they discuss the aftermath of the ICJ ruling, beginning at 7:54.
Tovah Lazaroff, “Blinken: Evidence against UNRWA ‘credible,’ agency can’t be replaced,” Jerusalem Post, January 30, 2024.
Ellen Ioanes, “UNRWA and Israel’s allegations against the Palestinian refugee agency, explained,” Vox, January 31, 2024.
Lazzarini was the UN official who formally issued a statement about Israel’s allegations on January 26, 2024, the day of the ICJ ruling as well as the withdrawal of funding of UNRWA by several donor nations. Lazzarini stated, in part, “‘The Israeli Authorities have provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several UNRWA employees in the horrific attacks on Israel on 7 October. To protect the Agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay.’”
Evan Dyer, “Canadian officials still haven’t seen intelligence linking UN’s Gaza aid agency with Hamas sources,” CBC.ca, February 7, 2024.
Jackie Northam, “Report on UNRWA concludes Israel has not provided evidence of employees’ militancy,” NPR, April 23, 2024.
Prem Thakkar, “U.S. Doubles Down on Defunding UNRWA — Despite Flimsy Allegations,” The Intercept, March 22, 2024.
Considering that Israel has stated that the incursion into Gaza may last another seven months, if not longer, I note that those time points roughly bookend each other.
“UNRWA report says Israel coerced some agency employees to falsely admit Hamas links,” Reuters, March 8, 2024.
Consider that, in this case, these allegations may have been precisely what Israeli interrogators wanted to hear. In such a case, the claims made under duress and desperation may have produced exactly what would be expedient for Israel to accomplish a long-range goal.
If you understand electoral politics as a team sport, it becomes obvious why so many people readily defend what should be indefensible if “our side” is the one doing it. We have to support “our side” no matter what, whether it engages in war crimes, covers up felonies, governs ineptly, or flat out lies. Hence, the same people who twenty odd years ago were outraged when GWB’s spokesmen justified war crimes and domestic surveillance will now defend Biden for doing the same because, “there’s a lot we just don’t know about this situation and he’s doing his best.” This team sport mentality is also what allows people to accept and even enjoy being lied to about crimes against humanity. When people say things like, “this Middle East situation has been going on for thousands of years” (no, it hasn’t) or “both sides are to blame” (they aren’t), it just suggests to me that they don’t want to have to really think about the Israel/Palestine issue in a serious manner. It’s no wonder that the public can be lied to so easily when the level of “democracy” we have is so shallow.
Thank you for writing this. US defunded UNRWA, acellerating starvation of Gazans, based on Israel's blatantly obvious lies -- after torturing UNRWA employees.
That's on Biden admin and Congress. Both are promoting and enabling this genocide. USA is digging its own grave. Beyond sick. Evil and incomprehensible.