So @RoKhanna continues to double down on his alliance with Hamas in his shameless courting of the anti-Israel left in his party. Want to know more about the person he wants released? An Israeli civilian court in Tel Aviv convicted Marwan Barghouti in May 2004 on five counts of murder for orchestrating a string of attacks by Fatah's Tanzim militia and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades — including the 2001 killing of a Greek Orthodox monk near Ma'ale Adumim, a 2002 shooting near Givat Ze'ev, and the 2002 Seafood Market restaurant bombing in Tel Aviv that killed three civilians — plus attempted murder for a failed car-bomb plot and membership in a terrorist organization. Ro Khanna is trying to out-flank Abdul El-Sayed, Hasan Piker, and Zohran Mamdani for ownership of the party's pro-Hamas fringe — and burying whatever's left of a Democratic foreign policy that could win a general election. He should be ashamed.

I have written eleven opinion pieces for The New York Times across 35 years. I still read it. I write what follows with no joy: while I have watched it become increasingly partisan in its news coverage over the decades, no topic has made its loss of balance clearer to me than its handling of Israel since October 7. This week the Times published a sentence suggesting that Israeli victimhood over the 2023 Hamas terror attack was not a fact, but a "matter of perception." It only added an Editors' Note after furious backlash, much of it here on X. I have written corrections myself. A sentence like that doesn't slip past a reporter, an editor, and a copy desk by accident. The underlying problem is that it did not set off an alarm until readers outside the building made noise. And that was simply the latest example. In May, the paper's Opinion section ran a column alleging Israeli forces used dogs to rape Palestinian detainees, built on sourcing no other serious outlet had corroborated. The Times's own executive editor later said the newsroom "wouldn't have done that exact piece." Now there's data behind the pattern. A peer-reviewed Yale study of 1,559 Times articles on the war found the word "Israel" appeared more than three times as often as "Hamas," and that 1,423 of those articles mentioned neither Israeli casualties after Oct. 7 nor Hamas combatants killed in the war. "Paper of record" was never a hereditary title. It was a claim about earned trust. I am not sure anyone still believes it. My full article at Just the Facts:

What Bill Clinton just told a New York radio audience about bin Laden is not true. I know, because I reported this out in detail for my 2003 book, "Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11." On WABC, Clinton said: "I had authorized the CIA to try to take him out. But they were afraid that if they missed, they'd kill a lot of innocent civilians. They didn't want to run the risk. I didn't second-guess them..." That is not what happened at the moment his administration had its best shot. On May 18, 1996, bin Laden left Khartoum for Jalalabad aboard a chartered C-130, traveling with his wives, children, and roughly 150 of his top aides and lieutenants. The flight had to stop to refuel in Qatar. The CIA's Counterterrorism Center drew up an operations plan to interdict that plane in international airspace and force it down. It went to the White House and was presented to President Clinton. And he decided not to act — because he and most of his senior advisors already considered it a win just to have pushed bin Laden out of Sudan. Here is what a former CIA analyst assigned to the Counterterrorism Center told me on the record for the book: "We were just incensed after we learned there would be no action on our recommendation. We had clear and convincing proof of what bin Laden had done, and it would have been easy to bring him in." And here's the part Clinton doesn't mention on the radio: after 9/11, he told a dinner guest in New York that passing on bin Laden in 1996 was "probably the biggest mistake of my presidency." So the CIA didn't block a strike out of fear of civilian casualties. The decision not to act on a workable interdiction plan was made at the top of the administration. Rewriting that now doesn't change the record.

BREAKING. A shameful prelude to the 9/11 anniversary. Two days after a military judge finally set a 2028 trial date for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the same judge has thrown out KSM’s 2007 FBI confessions — the statements prosecutors called their most crucial evidence needed to get a death penalty verdict, and possibly a conviction not subject to endless appeals. The military judge, Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, ruled the statements were not voluntary. He found an “unbroken continuation” of CIA psychological conditioning from the black sites into the Gitmo interrogations, and that FBI agents never clearly told KSM he had the right to remain silent and consult a lawyer. The 45-page order lands less than two weeks before the 25th commemoration of the attacks that killed 2,977 people. KSM was captured in 2003. He has been at Guantánamo since 2006. The case was arraigned in 2012. The trial is now provisionally set for June 5, 2028. The government’s best post-CIA statements just vanished from the record. Justice here is not simply delayed. It is being incrementally dismantled by the very safeguards we tell ourselves distinguish us from the people who flew the planes. The families have waited 25 years. The defendants have waited them out. The Islamists do not need to beat the system. They only need the system to keep beating itself.

@simonmontefiore @wnbooks So great to see that. Every manuscript I’ve ever finished looks very much like that. I buy #2# red pencils by the box to start the edit. Looking forward to read The Cauldron.

It's live on Just the Facts: Genocide for Dummies. A plain-language primer on what the word actually requires under international law, what the recognized cases look like, and why the evidence from Gaza falls short of that standard. I did not write it as an advocate. I have no brief to defend and no side to win. I wrote it as a primer — the kind of thing you should read before you enter this argument, so that when you do, you know what the word requires and what a competent court would apply. At the end, I lay out the evidence that would change my mind. Not a rhetorical gesture. A falsifiable standard, in writing, under my name: Show me an order or a plan to destroy Palestinians as such. Show me a pattern of conduct from which destruction is the only reasonable inference — one that survives contact with the alternative explanation, a brutal war against an enemy embedded in a civilian population. Show me a competent tribunal that has weighed adversarial evidence, with a defense in the room, and returned that verdict. Bring me those and I will write the correction myself. Paywall free link in the first reply. Read it before you call Gaza a genocide.

Someone I've known for twenty years lives a couple of blocks away. He is not a partisan, he does not post about the Middle East, and he is not the sort of person who chants anything. Out of the blue, he asked me: "Do you think there's a genocide in Gaza?" No, I told him. By every metric that matters — legal, historical, statistical — there is not. He looked at me the way you look at someone who has just told you the earth is flat. Netanyahu wants to eliminate the Palestinian people, he said. Everybody knows that. Not a study. Not a court ruling. Not a casualty figure. Just a thing everybody knows. I have spent forty years as a reporter learning that "everybody knows" is where investigations begin, not where they end. Tomorrow on Just the Facts: Genocide for Dummies: a plain-language piece on what the word actually means under international law, how Gaza compares on every relevant metric, and why even the strongest case for the genocide charge still doesn't clear the bar the word requires. By the way, I know the title will bother some readers, and I address that directly in the piece. My argument is not that the subject is trivial — it is that the word is being used by people who cannot define it, at a threshold they have never examined, with a confidence that bears no relationship to the evidence.