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Politicians lie, and the people around them do too. When it’s convenient – when the whole world is pulsing with revulsion, for example – they begin to reveal flavors of the truth.
The Biden administration lied more than most, its public-facing members particularly. Its policy in Palestine was to embrace the Israelis in a “bear hug” – to smother them with love. And there’s thin cover for a genocide beyond lies.
Now, Matthew Miller, the former state department spokesperson, is speaking out. It appears he has a new job – one that seems to require public-facing work, which may explain his decision to sit for a Sky News interview. You take your lumps and get it over with. Only I’m not sure it’s over for Miller.
In the interview, the former spokesman shared his personal view that it is “without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes”. Asked if that had been true when he was employed by the government, he suggested that lying is just part of the job: “You are a spokesperson for the president, the administration, and you espouse the positions of the administration. And when you’re not in the administration, you can just give your own opinions.”
Miller isn’t alone. The Biden-era spokespeople for the genocide included the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and the deputy state department spokesperson Vedant Patel, as well as Jake Sullivan, a primary policymaker for an addled president, who represented the actual center of power along with John Kirby, a former admiral, and Antony Blinken, the former secretary of state. The group spent the period from October 2023 to January 2025 lying to an anguished public. They lied scornfully (Jean-Pierre) or gleefully (Miller), mawkishly (Kirby and Blinken), or blandly (Patel and Sullivan). And they did it every day, for 15 months.
They told extravagant lies: Hamas beheaded 40 babies. They told savage lies about “command and control” centers under al-Shifa hospital – they told us not to believe what we’d seen and to believe what they couldn’t show us. They lied about Israeli investigations and Biden’s humanity, his capacity for “empathy”. Every lie they told was consequential, about infants in incubators; about the execution of Hind Rajab, a child; and about the way in which their pier was used to facilitate an Israeli massacre.
They lied about the things that matter most. They lied to obscure a genocide, spinning whorls of confusion.
In the Sky News interview, Miller twitched visibly just before he made the remarks about war crimes. Watching him, I wondered what had happened to his confidence, the brazen and unembarrassed way in which he skipped, lightly, through so much human carnage, whistling past Gaza’s profusion of mass graves.
And yet, despite himself, the former spokesperson continues to lie. He claims to not know if what the Biden administration has orchestrated in Gaza is a genocide, perhaps to shield himself from the worst of the moral reckoning. The tactic he’s taken is a tired one, and the interview is self-indulgent.
But at least Miller is braver than the others. In a video recorded at Harvard’s Kennedy School, which is where both Brett McGurk, who also helped orchestrate the genocide, and Jake Sullivan have taken jobs, Sullivan meekly, dishonestly describes “the choices the president made”.
The choices the president made.
It all brings to mind the former secretary of defense Robert McNamara’s book, In Retrospect, a self-exculpatory account of his participation in the Vietnam war. Two million civilians were killed in that conflict, which achieved nothing, and was fought for nothing. And yet, McNamara waited 20 years to publish that account, long after many of his victims had died.
So with that retrospective, we may encourage Sullivan, Miller, McGurk, Jean-Pierre, Blinken, Patel and all the others to come forward. If they do, they will be pilloried and mocked and verbally abused for what they’ve done.
But they should do it anyway, because they owe their victims so much. Not least the truth.
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Ahmed Moor is a writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace
