An anonymous group of junior staff members has modeled its effort on an internal State Department messaging system, hoping to create an outlet for calls for a cease-fire in the war in Gaza.
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Protests near the Capitol last week while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke to a joint meeting of Congress. A group of staff aides organized a pro-Palestinian walkout on Capitol Hill the same day.
Since Israel began its military offensive in Gaza last fall, hundreds of congressional aides have spoken out in protest of the United States’ support for the war — many of them breaking with their bosses to do so.
Acting anonymously to protect their coveted positions on Capitol Hill, they have written letters, circulated petitions, posted on social media and, in some cases, walked off the job to push for a cease-fire and an end to the shipments of U.S.-made weapons to Israel. They argue that members of Congress have refused to heed Americans’ objections — expressed through hundreds of thousands of calls, letters, emails and in-person visits to their offices — to the war and Israel’s conduct in it.
On Sunday night, a group of at least a dozen junior staff members escalated their objections by launching a website where they and their like-minded colleagues can publish anonymous memos criticizing U.S. policy on Israel and the war in Gaza — including their own bosses’ positions — without risking retaliation.
Organizers say the forum, known as the Congressional Dissent Channel, is modeled after the State Department’s dissent channel for Foreign Service officers. That channel was created during the Vietnam War — another conflict that opened bitter political divisions in the United States and galvanized a protest movement, particularly among young Americans.
But while that channel is a classified internal government system in which named authors offer dissenting views that are distributed carefully and confidentially, the new website is the opposite: a public platform where anonymous congressional aides can air their criticisms and spotlight private discord within their offices.
It is being created by the same group of staff aides that organized a pro-Palestinian staff walkout on Capitol Hill last week when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke to a joint meeting of Congress, and which planned an anonymous flower vigil outside the Capitol in November to demand a cease-fire.
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Source: nytimes.com
