Ross is wrong: Hamas has long been an obvious threat to the United States and to American lives. Indeed, Hamas violence against Americans is why Congress passed the 2018 Taylor Force Act to prevent the United States from funding the “Pay for Slay” program by which hundreds of Hamas terrorists and their families benefited directly from over half a billion American taxpayer dollars that the United States funnels to the Palestinian Authority. …

It’s also not true the United States doesn’t train enormous intelligence assets on Hamas. As everyone now knows, the NSA collects on virtually everyone in the world. Further, the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East is in Qatar at Al Udeid Air Base, which is also the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command. The Gulf emirate hosts Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, and former chief Khaled Mashal. …

So what about the claims that the United States knew nothing about the attack — but that U.S. allies like Egypt were indeed aware, and warned Israel?

None of those stories add up, either.

Egypt is a U.S. listening post, which is why it was strange to hear that the Cairo government had given a heads-up about the attack to Jerusalem but not Washington. … Obviously if the Egyptians did have something on a major Hamas operation designed to murder hundreds of Israelis, especially while Washington was in the midst of trying to broker peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, they’d have given it to the Americans immediately. …

Yet [misdirection and coverups from]  U.S. intelligence bureaucrats raises a larger complication: If the United States was really blindsided by the attack, as Biden administration officials claimed, why are they out there arguing against the idea that the Iranians played an operational role? …

Open-source reporting shows that Biden officials knew for at least half a year that the Iranians were in planning sessions with their terror assets, Hamas and Hezbollah. Back in April, The Wall Street Journal reported that Esmail Qaani, commander of the Quds Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ foreign terror unit, was meeting in Beirut with Haniyeh and Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah. …

The United States can’t possibly have not known about this meeting, and could have easily followed up directly on the purpose of it, given its capacities inside Lebanon. The Biden administration has allocated $72 million to pay the salaries of both the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the country’s Internal Security Forces (ISF). …

According to an Oct. 13 New York Times article, Hamas fighters who flew paragliders into Israel to massacre Jews did their training in Lebanon. It seems highly unlikely that the United States, with intense intelligence operations right there, somehow missed the hordes of paragliders all of sudden randomly flocking to do training in Lebanon at the same time. …