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‘Amateur Hour’: Biden Admin’s Floating Gaza Pier Problems Go From Bad To Worse

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8 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By JAKE SMITH

 

New problems are mounting for the Biden administration’s $320 million floating Gaza aid pier which was already facing setbacks, despite becoming operational less than two weeks ago.

The U.S. military was forced to halt aid shipments to Gaza on Tuesday after the floating pier was damaged by bad weather over the weekend. The damage sustained from the bad weather is only the latest in a string of logistical and operational problems that have plagued the pier since it was constructed in mid May.

The JLOTS pier was a “horrible idea,” Michael DiMino, senior fellow at Defense Priorities and former CIA and defense official, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s a horrible idea due to the challenges that we just saw basically wreck the whole project.”

“It was never a sound plan to begin with… whether it’s accidents, or logistical hurdles, or risk to our troops and all these problems that have come to fruition. I don’t think that there should be any effort to try to continue this, or salvage it, or fix it,” DiMino said, pointing to safer, more effective methods of delivering aid to Gaza. “I think now is an opportunity to say this failed. Let’s wrap this up before we continue to tempt fate.”

Getting aid into Gaza via the JLOTS system requires several steps. Aid is first delivered by vessels to the floating pier off the shores of Gaza, where it is facilitated by U.S. officials. It is then picked up by loading vessels and transferred back to a separate causeway pier attached to the shores of Gaza, then trucked by various aid groups to warehouses for distribution.

Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh confirmed that U.S. aid deliveries had been halted after rough weather and choppy waters broke the causeway pier apart on Tuesday, rendering it useless for the time being. The pier will be removed from the coast of Gaza and towed northbound to Israel for repairs; it will take “at least over a week” to fix the pier before it can be re-anchored on the Gaza coastline, Singh told reporters.

“We had a perfect storm of high sea states… creating not an optimal environment to operate this JLOTS pier,” Singh said Tuesday, responding to a question as to whether the pier is too fragile to withstand tough conditions. “Hopefully weather conditions won’t hinder it anymore [once it is operational again].”

The pier can only be operated during favorable sea conditions, in a maximum of three-foot waves and wind speeds not higher than 15 miles per hour. Aside from the minimum week timeline, reconstruction efforts cannot take place if sea conditions are poor, possibly adding further delays

The incident comes just a day after a separate stint of bad weather unmoored four U.S. Army vessels supporting the JLOTS system and sent them floating away from the operational site off the coast of Gaza. Two vessels floated north and were beached in Ashdod, Israel, while the other two anchored on the Gaza coast near the causeway. One of the vessels has been recovered, and the other three will be recovered by Thursday, Singh told reporters during Tuesday’s press briefing.

video from the incident appears to depict U.S. soldiers from one of the beached vessels in Gaza stranded on the shores of Gaza while awaiting rescue, despite the Biden administration’s promise that there would be no U.S. “boots on the ground” in the region during JLOTS operations.

“This is amateur hour. It’s unacceptable that there’s so little planning that appears to have gone into this, to the point where half a dozen U.S. troops are washed ashore in a war zone surrounded by Hamas,” DiMino told the DCNF.

That problem was proceeded by another incident last week in which three U.S. troops suffered injuries during JLOTS operations. While exact details haven’t been disclosed — other than that it was a non-combat incident — two of the troops suffered minor injuries and the third was critically injured and subsequently evacuated to an Israeli hospital for emergency care; he is still in critical condition, Singh said Tuesday.

Days after the JLOTS system was constructed, shipments that made it to the shores of Gaza via the causeway and floating pier were quickly stolen off of trucks by crowds of hungry civilians, creating security concerns among aid groups responsible for distribution. The United Nations and U.S. have discussed alternate routes for trucks to transfer aid to warehouses in lieu of the incident.

There are also security concerns for the U.S. troops supporting the JLOTS operations. Pentagon officials, including Department of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, have admitted there is a baseline risk that Hamas operatives on the ground in Gaza could stage an attack on the causeway or fire at troops offshore.

More broadly, only a fraction of the aid needed to address the humanitarian needs of the millions of Palestinians in Gaza can be delivered via the JLOTS system, even when fully operational. U.S. officials have said that roughly 90 trucks worth of aid will be delivered to Gaza via JLOTS in the interim, and eventually up to 150 trucks once the system is at full capacity.

But the UN previously told the DCNF in a statement that hundreds of trucks of aid are needed on a daily basis.

“That makes the pier a relative drop in the bucket at best — a waste of $320 million American taxpayer dollars and the futile deployment of 1,000 U.S. service personnel,” Shoshana Bryen, senior policy director at the Jewish Policy Center, previously told the DCNF.

It is far safer and more effective to deliver aid to the Palestinians through other methods, chiefly by truck convoys through border crossings in Egypt to the south and Israel to the west, of which there are several. The international community has expressed concern that Israel and Egypt are not allowing enough aid to enter through these crossings, though Israel counters that it is already going to great lengths to ensure delivery; Egypt refused to allow hundreds of trucks worth of aid to enter Gaza through the Rafah border crossing until recently.

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Business

Trump’s Initial DOGE Executive Order Doesn’t Quite ‘Dismantle Government Bureaucracy’

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Thomas English

President Donald Trump’s Monday executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) presents a more modest scope for the initiative, focusing primarily on “modernizing federal technology and software.”

The executive order refashions the Obama-era United States Digital Service (USDS) into the United States DOGE Service. Then-President Barack Obama created USDS in 2014 to enhance the reliability and usability of online federal services after the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, an insurance exchange website created through the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Trump’s USDS will now prioritize “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity” under the order, which makes no mention of slashing the federal budget, workforce or regulations — DOGE’s originally advertised purpose.

“I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’),” Trump said in his official announcement of the initiative in November. “Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess government regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

The order’s focus on streamlining federal technology and software stands in contrast to some of DOGE’s previously more expansive aims, including Elon Musk’s claim that “we can [cut the federal budget] by at least $2 trillion” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in November. Musk now leads DOGE alone after Vivek Ramaswamy stepped down from the initiative Monday, apparently eying a 2026 gubernatorial run in Ohio.

The order says it serves to “advance the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda,” but omits many of the budget-cutting and workforce-slashing proposals during Trump’s campaign. Rather, the order positions DOGE as a technology modernization entity rather than an organization with direct authority to enact sweeping fiscal reforms. There is no mention, for instance, of trillions in budget cuts or a significant reduction in the federal workforce, though the president did separately enact a hiring freeze throughout the executive branch Monday.

“I can’t help but think that there’s more coming, that maybe more responsibilities will be added to it,” Susan Dudley, a public policy professor at George Washington University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Dudley, who was also the top regulatory official in former President George W. Bush’s administration, said the structure of the new USDS could impact the recent lawsuits against the DOGE effort.

“I think it maybe moots the lawsuit that’s been brought for it not being FACA,” Dudley said. “So if this is how it’s organized — that it’s people in the government who bring in these special government employees on a temporary basis, that might mean that the lawsuit doesn’t really have any ground.”

Three organizations — the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), National Security Counselors (NSC) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) — separately filed lawsuits against DOGE within minutes of Trump signing the executive order. The suits primarily challenge DOGE’s compliance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), alleging the department operates without the required transparency, balanced representation and public accountability.

The order also emphasizes not “be construed to impair or otherwise affect … the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.”

“And the only mention of OMB [Office of Management and Budget] is some kind of boilerplate at the end — that it doesn’t affect that. But that’s kind of general stuff you often see in executive orders,” Dudley continued, adding she doesn’t “have an inside track” on whether further DOGE-related executive orders will follow.

“It’s certainly, certainly more modest than I think Musk was anticipating,” Dudley said.

Trump’s order also establishes “DOGE Teams” consisting of at least four employees: a team lead, a human resources specialist, an engineer and an attorney. Each team will be assigned an executive agency with which it will implement the president’s “DOGE agenda.”

It remains unclear whether Monday’s executive order comprehensively defines DOGE, or if additional orders will be forthcoming to broaden its mandate.

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Crime

Former UK MP says ‘nothing was done’ with child trafficking information given to police, MI5

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From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

Andrew Bridgen says UK security agencies ignored detailed information about child trafficking, including names of people involved and where the children were being taken.

A former UK Member of Parliament says the top security agencies of Britain, including the police and MI5, are refusing to act on detailed information they’ve been given about child trafficking into the country.

Andrew Bridgen, who served as a popular Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire from 2010 until 2024, told Infowars founder Alex Jones in a Friday interview how he had raised concerns while in Parliament about “a number of individuals” who were evidently pedophiles.

“It was always passed to the police, to the National Crime Agency, and it involves senior politicians, very senior police officers, and nothing was ever done about it,” Bridgen told Jones.

He had explained that early in his career he had seen London police quash an investigation into child prostitution — and so this appeared to be a repeating pattern of cover-up of child sex crimes.

A former policeman named Jon Wedger had discovered that “children were being taken from children’s homes in the UK and prostituted on the weekend,” and were returning “under the influence of drugs and often with terrible venereal diseases, and the people at the homes were doing nothing about it.”

Upon further investigation, Wedger “wrote a report he sent to his superiors pointing out that child prostitution in London had not been investigated for decades.” However, instead of attempting to protect the children and stop the abuse, the police “threatened” Wedger, told him to retract the report, and fired him from the police force “on false pretenses,” according to Bridgen.

Later, Bridgen met a man who conducted a two-year investigation into sex abuse by pedophile and deceased Prime Minister Edward Heath. The police concluded that, were Heath alive, “he would have been arrested and charged with pedophilia.”

“If a former MP could have been a pedophile and it was covered up, then anything is possible,” Bridgen remarked.

He then told how last year a source approached him with “information about child trafficking into the UK,” including “detailed names of people involved on the ground; where the children were being brought in; where they were being taken; where their photographs were being taken; and the name of the company that was instrumental in laundering the money” used to buy these children.

“Meaning they were tipped off,” Jones noted.

Bridgen told how the source had recorded all of his phone calls with MI5, the police force, and the National Crime Agency, and when they failed to act, Bridgen “sent a file with all the information to senior politicians.”

“Eventually, all I got back was, ‘Take it to the police.’ I pointed out this had already been to the police, and it had been to MI5. There actually was an MI5 officer who had been very sympathetic and realized how important this evidence was. And he tried to push it. He was removed from the service. That’s how deep the corruption runs.”

In a June 2024 interview on the Resistance Podcast, Bridgen elaborated, “And then when you see the names, you see why. They are known names.”

He shared further horrifying details about the final end of the children who are trafficked and abused.

“They use them in the sex trade for about three years and then when they’re worn out they organ harvest them,” Bridgen shared.

“No one’s interested. No one wants to talk about it. No one wants to talk about a lot of things.”

Bridgen believes this demand for child trafficking is an explanation for the drive to continue wars around the world, including the war in Ukraine, because the conflicts present “a huge opportunity for child trafficking.”

Jones pointed out it was publicly admitted that decades ago, sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein entered war zones in Kosovo and Serbia and bought “nine- and 10-year-old girls” in order to sell them into sex slavery in the U.S. The father of Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was one of the main directors of the “blackmail pedophile operations” of “MI6 and Mossad,” according to Jones.

“Ultimately, I think it’s the glue that holds the self-proclaimed elites around the world together, because once they’re involved in pedophilia or profiting from child trafficking, it’s the ultimate blackmail,” Bridgen said. “There’s no way out of the club for them. They all have to go down together.”

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