Letter From an American in São Paulo

(Part 2 of 4)

Hello. Welcome to Part 2 of the op-ed I wrote in São Paulo. Please allow me to make a few introductory remarks.

Zé Ninguém and I have long felt that the United States and Brazil share a lot in common when it comes to culture and politics. However, there is one big exception – and that is why we started Porcupine Press. Recently, each of our countries has had to endure a spectacularly and historically awful president. Both of these men were authoritarian wannabes who had nothing but contempt for democracy. After running for re-election and losing, they each organized a coup d’etat in a futile attempt to remain in office. In the U.S., nine people died as a result of the failed coup.

But in Brazil, you put your guy in prison. We re-elected our guy!

This op-ed concerns a truly horrific, unforgivable crime perpetrated by my country’s government. In the past, when a crisis like this happened, we had a functioning legislative branch – the U.S. Congress – that would conduct investigations. To determine the facts and pursue justice, Congress would form a committee, call witnesses, and compel them to testify. The proceedings would be broadcast nationwide on live television. Both of the major political parties – the Republicans and the Democrats – would buy into the process and cooperate in carrying it out. At the conclusion of the investigation, the committee would publish a final, bipartisan report that contained findings and recommendations.

During the 1970s, for example, there were at least six major investigations into such issues as President Nixon and the Watergate scandal, the abuses of intelligence agencies (plotting to kill foreign leaders, spying domestically on citizens), and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Well, those halcyon days of accountability and truth-seeking are long gone. The demise of the bipartisan congressional investigation can be traced back to the early 2000s and the so-called “war on terror.” This was a time when the U.S. government approved and ordered the use of torture. The era represented a new low for my country. Sure, prisoner abuse and racism have always been part of America’s penal system, and our military has committed atrocities like the My Lai Massacre (and, more recently, the massacre of 168 girls at an elementary school in Iran). But this was the first time the U.S. officially practiced torture – with approval from government lawyers, and with various torture techniques being devised, refined, documented, and taught to U.S. personnel.

One of the first people we tortured to death, in December 2002, was a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar. This innocent suspect was brutalized over five days at a detention facility inside the Bagram Air Base. Dilawar received more than 100 strikes to his legs, where soldiers would aim for the peroneal nerve behind his knee caps. Routinely beating Dilawar became something of a running joke. The Americans found it amusing that, after each blow, he would always scream out the word “Allah!” Medical examiners ruled the cause of death to be homicide. The autopsy report indicated Dilawar’s legs had “essentially been pulpified.” If he had been able to survive the ordeal, doctors would have had to amputate his legs.

During the early days of the war on terror, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) stupidly filmed the torture sessions it conducted at its secret facility in Thailand. Fortunately for the impunity of all involved, in 2005 the agency had the sense to destroy these videotapes – all 92 of them. Remarkably, the hundreds of hours of torture they captured had been inflicted on just two detainees: Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Indeed, CIA records reveal that during the month of August 2002, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times! (FYI, the word “torture” is not part of the U.S. government’s lexicon. The term you should use is “enhanced interrogation.”)

But I digress. The point I’m getting at is this: Fittingly, it was America’s disgraceful use of torture that marked the beginning of the end for meaningful congressional oversight. In 2009, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence launched a formal, bipartisan investigation of the American detention and interrogation program. Over the next four years, investigators reviewed more than six million CIA documents and Committee staff began drafting what would become a 6,700 page report.

Unfortunately, the investigation coincided with a major development in American politics. On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated and began serving his four-year term as the 44th president of the United States – the first Black person ever to be elected and serve in this position. The religious right and the grassroots of the Republican Party reacted as you might expect.

By the time of late 2012, when the final report was nearly finalized, Republicans let it be known that they were no longer taking part in the investigation and would refuse to endorse the report’s findings. They were incensed that Committee Democrats thought enhanced interrogation looked a lot like torture. The interrogation techniques under investigation included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, walling (slamming people into walls), confinement boxes, and face slapping. And worst of all, in addition to acting so smug and morally superior because of their opposition to torture, the Democrats believed enhanced interrogation was a useless method to obtain actionable intelligence! They thought that people who are being tortured will say whatever they think their torturers want to hear. To the contrary, Republicans were certain that enhanced interrogation had prevented terrorist attacks and saved lives.

So all that four years of work went down the drain. The Committee never released its final report, which remains a classified, top secret document to this day. And of course, no American personnel were ever prosecuted, reprimanded, or lost a vacation day because they facilitated or engaged in torture – or, if you prefer, “enhanced interrogation.”

That concludes this introduction. To summarize, the White House is occupied by a traitor who has betrayed the Constitution and the principles of the founders who framed it. Bipartisan congressional investigations are no longer possible due to the radicalization of the Republican Party, as well the MAGAverse and its renunciation of a shared reality. There will be no federal investigation into the Trump administration’s cover-up of Jeffrey Epstein and his international child sex trafficking ring. Nor of the extrajudicial killings of more than 150 people off the coasts of Latin America. Nor of the murder in January 2026 of two American citizens in Minneapolis who were peacefully exercising their right to freedom of speech. Nor of the illegal, unprovoked war the Trump administration recently launched in the Middle East without congressional approval.

And the U.S. Congress will never investigate how and why the United States committed genocide in Gaza.

PART 2

How Israel and the U.S. are Starving Gaza

With the full backing of the United States, Israel is now using starvation as a weapon of war. Currently, there are only two ways to leave the Gaza Strip by land: the Rafah Crossing into Egypt and the Kerem Shalom Crossing into Israel. Neither Egypt or Israel will permit Palestinians to use these exit points. The word that best characterizes this situation is “siege.” Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, a siege is a war crime if adequate humanitarian aid for civilians is not allowed to enter the besieged area. It is also a war crime to deliberately starve civilians.

Let’s review how Israel and the U.S. are conducting this depraved starvation campaign. First, Israel made it impossible for the United Nations to adequately provide food and other humanitarian relief through its agency, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). Over the past two years, the Israel Defense Forces has bombed 311 of UNRWA’s facilities (many on multiple occasions) and killed more than 300 of its staff members. Then it outright banned the organization from operating in Gaza. UNRWA has been operating in the Gaza Strip for 75 years (since 1950), and it currently provides aid to more than 80% of all Gazans. Everybody – humanitarian organizations, UN agencies, and the world’s nations – agrees that there is no other organization that can match or replace UNRWA’s scale, reach, and logistical capacity.

So why did Israel ban UNRWA? Israel says it discovered that 12 members of the agency’s staff took part in the October 7th attacks. Even if this allegation is true, one dozen staff members (whom the UN immediately fired before launching an internal investigation) represents but a tiny fraction of UNRWA’s 13,000 Gaza-based employees! Moreover, Israel made this allegation in January 2024, but then waited a full year – until late January 2025, right in the middle of its cease-fire with Hamas – to implement the ban on UNRWA operations. Why did they wait so long? Well, one reason just might be that, in January 2025, Donald Trump assumed the presidency for his second term in office. Although President Joe Biden provided unstinting support for Netanyahu’s war crimes, even he might have objected to a policy change guaranteed to spur the onset of famine. Also, to be really cynical, if the Israel government began enforcing the ban on UNRWA’s operations while it was actively at war killing Gazans, they could be accused of using starvation as a weapon of war!

So Israel began enforcing the ban on UNRWA on 2 March 2025, just two weeks before it broke the cease-fire. That same day, Israel also went much further by imposing a blockade on any type of humanitarian aid for Gaza by all other relief organizations (including food, medical supplies, tents and fuel). This total blockade – a truly horrific war crime – lasted for two and a half months, until May 19th. The new Trump administration offered no criticism or objections whatsoever. In contrast, European nations and UN officials warned the blockade would lead to famine and likely result in failure of the cease-fire.

And then, even more horrors. During May 2025, Israel and the U.S. unveiled a new organization with the Orwellian name, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Ostensibly created to provide food aid for Gazan civilians, the actual mission of the GHF seems to be to make life in Gaza even more cruel, surreal, and deadly. Before being banned, UNRWA operated 400 food distribution sites throughout the Gaza Strip, located in the areas where people lived. GHF replaced them all with a mere four distribution sites – and they were all located in the south, far from most communities. Three of the distribution sites were also situated in or near active combat zones. Thanks to the GHF, Gazans now faced a dilemma: they could either starve to death or risk being shot while making dangerous treks on foot over distances as long as 10 to 25 kilometers.

During the last few months, Israel has killed more than one thousand starving, emaciated and unarmed Palestinians while they tried to reach the four GHF food distribution sites! The Israeli military says it has fired “warning shots” to disperse crowds, but medical authorities say civilian fatalities are often due to direct gunfire hits to the torso. Civilians have also been killed by shells and missiles fired by artillery, tanks and even drones. The Israel Defense Forces are doing most of the killing, but there are credible reports that private contractors working for GHF have also shot aid-seekers. More than 80% of these contractors are Americans with prior military or police force experience, who were hastily recruited in the U.S. and deployed to Gaza using Israeli tourist visas.

Adding to the cruelty, there is no organized, orderly process for food distribution. The GHF sites open at varying times, and the food is often gone in less than 15 minutes. For this reason, many Gazans undertake their journeys during the middle of the night and camp on the outskirts of the distribution sites, so they can be close by when they open. This is especially dangerous, because Israeli soldiers are more likely to kill civilians at night by “mistaking” them for enemy combatants. When the distribution sites open, there is a chaotic free-for-all in which only the quickest, strongest and most aggressive can get to the boxes and sacks of food first. Many aid-seekers leave empty-handed. It has been reported that some American contractors laugh at the starving Gazans and refer to them as “the zombie hordes.”

Just who or what is the GHF? Good question! It is a private organization that was quickly cobbled together in 2024 by Israeli officials and American security contractors. Its creation, leadership and funding are shrouded in mystery. The only countries that will admit to supporting it are the United States and Israel, but the funding they have publicly acknowledged doesn’t come close to covering the organization’s total operating costs.

It is easier to say what GHF is not. It is not a reputable non-profit organization led and staffed by professionals with experience in international humanitarian aid or health care. It is not an organization that has the resources and capacity to prevent famine in Gaza. It is not an organization that operates with transparency and accountability to stakeholders. Indeed, the GHF is so dubious and questionable that even Switzerland turned down its attempts to open a bank account!

More than 170 charities and non-governmental organizations have called for GHF to be shut down, saying that it fundamentally violates humanitarian principles. “GHF’s militarized model, coupled with its close collaboration with Israeli authorities, undermines the core humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.” Médecins Sans Frontières puts it more succinctly: “Humanitarian aid is being weaponised.”

And once again, there is this bizarre, recurring connection with religious zealots in the United States. It seems millions of American evangelicals are determined to see that Palestinians are forced to leave the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – dead or alive. The executive chairman of GHF is Johnnie Moore, an American evangelical leader who was co-chairman of the 2016 Trump campaign’s evangelical advisory board. He previously ran a faith-based public relations firm that represented many prominent evangelical leaders, including that previously-mentioned televangelist, Ms. Paula White-Cain. Moore has urged Trump to recognize Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem, and he has regularly attended prayer meetings in the Oval Office.

It is instructive to note that if Israel and the U.S. really want to quickly kill every Palestinian in Gaza, all they need to do is shut off the water supply. Gaza gets its potable water through three pipelines from an Israeli water company. Children would begin dying first, after about three days, from severe dehydration. However, this war tactic would be unseemly and result in bad optics. There would be intense global condemnation, and some countries might even consider intervening militarily to deliver drinking water.

It seems that Israel and the U.S. have adopted a slower, more diabolical and sadistic approach by which to starve Gaza into death and submission. By creating what is effectively a genocidal organization in the GHF, they can maintain the pretense that they care about Palestinian life. That should be sufficient to keep the international community at bay. After many hundreds of people begin starving to death, perhaps Arab nations such as Jordan and Egypt will relent and agree to accept Gazans as refugees. This way, Israel and the U.S. can maintain control over the outcome.

And what will that outcome be? The Israeli political parties that keep Netanyahu in power want Israel to annex the Gaza Strip for Jewish settlers. This is also the outcome fervently desired by millions of religious nuts in the United States.

But what does Trump want? Well, Trump is a real-estate developer. He thinks the current situation in Gaza is utterly appalling and unforgivable . . . a total waste of 25 miles of sunset-facing beachfront property! He believes every Palestinian should be expelled from the territory, without the right of return. After all, why do they even want to live there anyway? As Trump has noted with astonishment, “They live like they’re living in hell. . . What do they have? It is a big pile of rubble right now.” To the visible shock and disbelief of his own staff, Trump announced during a press event that the United States should take control of Gaza. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out.” Capitalizing upon his real estate expertise, the Gaza Strip could then be transformed into what he termed “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Trump said, “I do see a long-term ownership position” for the United States. “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land. Developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.”

(To be continued in Part 3)