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State department officials have in effect been able to circumvent the US law that is meant to prevent US complicity in human rights violations by foreign military units – the 1990s-era Leahy law, named after the now retired Vermont senator Patrick Leahy
An investigation by the Guardian reveals how special mechanisms have been used over the last few years to shield Israel from US human rights laws, even as other allies’ military units who receive US support – including, sources say, Ukraine – have privately been sanctioned and faced consequences for committing human rights violations
To close what was seen as a loophole in the law, Congress updated the process in 2019, by putting a system in place that prohibits the foreign government from providing US assistance to any unit of its security forces that the US identifies as being ineligible under the Leahy law due to a gross violation of human rights. The state department set up working groups to examine those countries where military assistance is considered “untraceable”.
But people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Israel had benefited from extraordinary policies inside the ILVF, details of which have not previously been reported. “Nobody said it but everyone knew the rules were different for Israel. No one will ever admit that, but it’s the truth,” said one former state department official.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In Omar Assad’s case, the Israeli military said last June it was not bringing criminal charges against soldiers who were involved in his death, even after he was alleged to have been dragged from a car, bound and blindfolded after being stopped at a checkpoint.
Paul told the Guardian “numerous people”, including himself, raised concerns over the years inside the state department that the Leahy process “is not working” and that gross violations of human rights were occurring “without accountability”.
For advocates of the Leahy law, like Rieser, the lack of accountability for the killing of Abu Akleh, the prominent Al Jazeera journalist, is particularly galling, and has been the subject of criticism by senior Democrats on Capitol Hill.
A CNN investigation found that there was no active combat or Palestinian militants near Abu Akleh in the moments before she was killed, and footage obtained by the network corroborated witness testimony that suggested Israeli forces had taken aim at the journalist.
In questions to the administration, the senators asked what, if any, steps the United States Security Coordinator (USSC), who conducted an independent forensic analysis of the bullet that killed Abu Akleh, took to try to establish who specifically shot her and why.
A February 2016 letter from Leahy to the then secretary of state, John Kerry, cited a “disturbing number of reports of possible gross violations of human rights by security forces in Israel and Egypt”, including “extrajudicial killings by Israeli military and police”.
The original article contains 3,017 words, the summary contains 245 words. Saved 92%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the worst summary I’ve ever seen this bot make. It’s not wrong but it just skipped the meat of the article and started listing numerous IDF human rights violations lol.