Americans like to think of themselves as peace loving people but in reality our country has been in a near constant state of war since WWII. We have no business giving weapons to the Saudis. Our military industrial complex is wagging the dog at this point. Bomb that killed 40 children in Yemen was supplied by the US The bomb used by the Saudi-led coalition in a devastating attack on a school bus in Yemen was sold as part of a US State Department-sanctioned arms deal with Saudi Arabia, munitions experts told CNN. Working with local Yemeni journalists and munitions experts, CNN has established that the weapon that left dozens of children dead on August 9 was a 500-pound (227 kilogram) laser-guided MK 82 bomb made by Lockheed Martin, one of the top US defense contractors. The bomb is very similar to the one that wreaked devastation in an attack on a funeral hall in Yemen in October 2016 in which 155 people were killed and hundreds more wounded. The Saudi coalition blamed "incorrect information" for that strike, admitted it was a mistake and took responsibility. The schoolboys on a field trip in Yemen were chatting and laughing. Then came the airstrike In March of that year, a strike on a Yemeni market -- this time reportedly by a US-supplied precision-guided MK 84 bomb -- killed 97 people. In the aftermath of the funeral hall attack, former US President Barack Obama banned the sale of precision-guided military technology to Saudi Arabia over "human rights concerns." The ban was overturned by the Trump administration's then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in March 2017. As the US-backed Saudi-led coalition scrambles to investigate the strike on the school bus, questions are growing from observers and rights groups about whether the US bears any moral culpability. The US says it does not make targeting decisions for the coalition, which is fighting a Houthi rebel insurgency in Yemen. But it does support its operations through billions of dollars in arms sales, the refueling of Saudi combat aircraft and some sharing of intelligence. "I will tell you that we do help them plan what we call, kind of targeting," said US Secretary of Defense James Mattis. "We do not do dynamic targeting for them." The latest strike has left the community in Yemen's northern Saada governorate reeling. Zeid Al Homran visits the graveyard where his two little boys are buried every day. On this occasion, he brought their five-year-old brother along. He is all Al Homran has left. "I was screaming in anger and all around me women were throwing themselves on the ground," he told CNN. "People were screaming out the names of their children. I tried to tell the women it couldn't be true but then a man ran through the crowd shouting that a plane had struck the children's bus." 'Bodies scattered everywhere' The bomb's impact as it landed on the bus full of excited schoolchildren on a day trip was devastating. Of the 51 people who died in the airstrike, 40 were children, Houthi Health Minister Taha al-Mutawakil said last week. He added that of the 79 people wounded, 56 were children. Eyewitnesses told CNN it was a direct hit in the middle of a busy market. "I saw the bomb hit the bus," one witness said. "It blew it into those shops and threw the bodies clear to the other side of those buildings. We found bodies scattered everywhere, there was a severed head inside the bomb crater. When we found that, that was when I started running. I was so afraid." Some of the bodies were so mutilated that identification became impossible. Left behind were scraps of schoolbooks, warped metal and a single backpack. Images of shrapnel filmed in the immediate aftermath of the attack were sent to CNN by a contact in Saada. Subsequently, a cameraman working for CNN filmed footage of the shrapnel after the cleanup operation had begun. Munitions experts confirmed that the numbers on it identified Lockheed Martin as its maker and that this particular MK 82 was a Paveway, a laser-guided bomb. Asked to comment on CNN's evidence, coalition spokesman Col. Turki al-Maliki said: "The democratically elected government of Yemen has been displaced by an Iranian-backed insurgency by minority Houthi militias." "The coalition is in Yemen with the support of the UN Security Council to restore the legitimate government. The coalition is operating in accordance with international humanitarian law, taking all practical measures to minimize civilian casualties. Every civilian casualty is a tragedy." He added that it would not "be appropriate for the coalition to comment further while the investigation is underway." Saudi Arabia denies targeting civilians and defended the incident as a "legitimate military operation" and a retaliatory response to a Houthi ballistic missile from the day before. A Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Cmdr. Rebecca Rebarich, declined to confirm the provenance of the bomb. "The US has worked with the Saudi-led coalition to help them improve procedures and oversight mechanisms to reduce civilian casualties," she said. "While we do not independently verify claims of civilian casualties in which we are not directly involved, we call on all sides to reduce such casualties, including those caused via ballistic missile attacks on civilian population centers in Saudi Arabia." The United Nations has called for a separate investigation into the strike, one of the deadliest since Yemen's war began in early 2015. Since then, the Saudi-led coalition has battled rebels in support of exiled President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Greater US oversight There have been growing calls in the US Congress for Saudi Arabia, a key US ally in the Middle East, to do more to cut civilian deaths in Yemen, where three years of conflict have taken a terrible toll. On Monday, US President Donald Trump signed a defense spending bill that includes a clause requiring the Pentagon and State Department to certify that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, another key coalition member, are doing enough to reduce civilian casualties. This report must be submitted to Congress within 180 days and then annually for the next two years. The US, alongside the UK and France, is a major supplier of arms to Saudi Arabia. Trump signed a nearly $110 billion defense deal with Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in May last year in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on what was his first stop abroad as President. In the same month, the US government reauthorized the export of Paveway munitions to Saudi Arabia, ending Obama's December 2016 ban. Retired Rear Adm. John Kirby, who served as a spokesman for the State Department and Pentagon under Obama, said the Saudis had a right to defend themselves against missile attacks from the Iranian-backed Houthis but that the Obama administration did not believe they were striking the right balance between that need and proper care for civilian life. Asked whether the US had moral complicity in the deaths in Yemen, he said: "The issue of complicity is one that international lawyers probably are best to work out, not somebody like me." "What I would tell you is that we certainly had under the Obama administration deep concerns about the way the Saudis were targeting, and we acted on those concerns by limiting the kinds of munitions that they were being given and stridently trying to argue for them to be more careful and cautious." 'Legitimate military action' In the immediate aftermath of the strike, al-Maliki, the coalition spokesman, told CNN it had been aimed at a "legitimate target." "No, this is not children in the bus," he said. "We do have high standard measures for targeting." The Saudi ambassador to the UN, Abdullah Al-Mouallimi, similarly told the Security Council this week that the strike was a "legitimate military action" and that "the targeted Houthi leaders were responsible for recruiting and training young children and sending them to battlefields." "We are not engaged in the civil war. We will help to prevent, you know, the killing of innocent people. I'm very concerned about the humanitarian situation," US Defense Secretary James Mattis said Sunday when asked about the strike. "Wars are always tragic, but we've got to find a way to protect the innocent in the midst of this one." Despite a lack of public condemnation over the school bus strike, there are signs that the Trump administration is taking action behind the scenes. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo discussed the Saudi-led strike with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a call on Monday. A three-star US general also raised the matter while in Saudi Arabia to meet with the Saudi government and other coalition partners, the Pentagon said. "The real key is whether or not the Pentagon can help change the calculus, the thinking, inside the Saudi military," said Kirby. The conflict in Yemen has resulted in the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with more than 22 million people -- three-quarters of the population -- in desperate need of aid and protection, according to the UN.
I was gonna start a thread on this at some point also. It's become a zombie war. Terribly sad on all accounts. Blindly started under Obama and Trump will do nothing about it other than blindly follow the Saudis and use Iran as an excuse to continue this stupid policy. I wish we would see as much outrage out this **** as we did over border policy. America Is Committing War Crimes and Doesn’t Even Know Why The United States has spent far more time obscuring its role in the Saudi-led war in Yemen than in explaining any rationale for it. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/1...awful-war-crimes-and-it-doesnt-even-know-why/ By any reasonable assessment, the U.S. government should have stopped providing direct military support to the Saudi Arabia-led air campaign in Yemen on the day after it started. Washington’s participation began on March 26, 2015, when a White House spokesperson announced, “President Obama has authorized the provision of logistical and intelligence support to [Gulf Cooperation Council]-led military operations.” On March 26, toward the end of a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) asked U.S. Central Command commander Gen. Lloyd Austin what the ultimate goal of the GCC air campaign in Yemen was, and for the general to estimate its likelihood of success. Gen. Austin answered with refreshing honesty: “I don’t currently know the specific goals and objectives of the Saudi campaign, and I would have to know that to be able to assess the likelihood of success.” Gillibrand replied, “Well, I do hope you get the information sooner than later.” In other words, the military commander responsible for overseeing the provision of support for a new air war in the Middle East did not know what the goals of the intervention were, or how he could evaluate whether it was successful. The United States had become a willing co-combatant in a war without any direction or clear end state. Two inevitable results have followed. First, there have been a litany of war crimes of the sort perpetrated last weekend, in which Saudi planes, using American munitions, bombed a school buskilling dozens of Yemeni schoolchildren. Second, the U.S. government has responded to these crimes with silences that might seem chastened, but in truth must be classified as defiant, given the bureaucratic maneuvering undertaken to obscure the United States’ unthinking complicity both to outsiders and to itself. (The U.S. military claims not to even track the results of the Yemeni missions that its forces are involved in.) Neither President Donald Trump, nor Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has publicly addressed this latest massacre. A Pentagon spokesperson only requested that Saudi Arabia “expeditiously and thoroughly investigate this tragic incident.” Three years into Yemen’s ever-worsening humanitarian nightmare, Congress and the American people have never received a clear response to Gillibrand’s preliminary and prescient question about whether the war has ever had a strategy at all. Civilian and military officials, for their part, have long since stopped pretending to clarify or defend America’s co-combatant status. Rather, they have highlighted their support for successive U.N. special envoys to broker a diplomatic peace process between the warring parties. Instead of clarifying U.S. policy, or acknowledging U.S. culpability for the indiscriminate air campaign that it facilitates, American officials have successfully offshored the problem to the United Nations. There is a simple reason officials from both the Obama and Trump administrations have made no public efforts to justify the material support provided to the Saudi-led intervention: It is unjustifiable. Less than a month into the U.S. role, an anonymous Pentagon official provided what is probably the most sincere answer: “If you ask why we’re backing this … the answer you’re going to get from most people—if they were being honest—is that we weren’t going to be able to stop it.” This constitutes gross strategic negligence: effectively allowing the poor decisions of Gulf monarchies to determine U.S. military policy. In off-the-record comments, Obama officials would try to make a policy rationale for participation in the Yemen war, connecting U.S. aid to Gulf militaries with their leaders’ support for the Iran nuclear deal. Since President Trump declared withdrawal from that deal three months ago, this already-tenuous justification no longer holds. Now, some Trump officials I have spoken with make an inherently weak argument to rationalize the continued backing of the air war: that it serves to “check Iran’s malign influence” in the region. This might be true were it not the case that whenever the United States intervenes in the Middle East, or supports others’ interventions, it creates the chaotic conditions that amplify Iran’s malign influence. Moreover, it is preposterous that backing a horrific and indiscriminate bombing campaign, which primarily targets Iranian-supported Houthi forces, will compel any change in Iran’s behavior outside of its territory. The only reason that I can guess why the United States continues to arm, train, and provide essential logistical support for the air campaign in Yemen, is that this support has occurred during both Democratic and Republican administrations; as we learned in Vietnam previously and Afghanistan every day, where poor strategic decisions are made and sustained by administrations of both major political parties, there is no political advantage for the party out of power to critique current policy. The elected leaders—in the White House and on Capitol Hill—of both parties are deeply implicated and responsible for each new civilian fatality from a U.S.-made munition that makes the news. But when we are all morally stained, it is easier to echo some version of the stunning claim made by Secretary of Defense James Mattis on Sunday: “We are not engaged in the civil war. We will help to prevent, you know, the killing of innocent people.” The United States has been directly engaged in the civil war since March 25, 2015, and its support has not prevented the killing of innocents. It is time to phase out and terminate America’s support for the Saudi-led component of this civil war, and, more importantly, never again go to war, or support other’s wars, without purpose or objectives.
summer School bus in Yemen! The classless rift with Canada of last week is worth bashing, but this one is sketchy
This sounds horrible. And, if true, shameful. Is there another side to the story? Looks like an op ed piece from a site I'm not familiar with. I don't know enough facts to figure out why this "war" was supported by two administrations.
What an evil example of the military industrial complex running wild. We makes lots of money selling the Saudis weapons to kill the Yemenis with. Of course there is the other aspect that the Saudis, and their kissing cousin other religious state Israel ,lead the US around by the nose in the Middle East.
They could drop cheap barrel bombs and some chemical weapons if they wanted to target civilians like the freedom fighters trio slash anti-imperialism of Assad, Mullahs and Russia
The military industrial complex saved us from the Cold War. However we, as citizens are responsible for not demanding our elected officials reign in the power and spending when the Cold War ended. Both sides are guilty, and it is a systematic problem. Every president since Clinton has used their power over the military to needlessly attack targets in countries we were not at war with, all in the name of safety and political gain.
Using civilians as shields is the excuse. Sounds mighty familiar, and it's no coincidence. The unholy union at work.
Yeah... this shows how disconnected you are. No grown American thinks the country is peace loving, more like... "there is a price for freedom" and they use that to justify the constant weapons production and the industry that supplying this brings. "Our lifestyle and freedom" comes at a price, the death of foreigners, is pretty much the accepted tag line in these industries. I don't see it going away as instability has always spelt big $ for the US and that is the fuel that feeds the most powerfur countury in worur.
The media plays a role in that because fear sells more ad revenue. The rise of radical Islam attacks coincide perfectly with the proliferation of the 24 hour news cycle. Most Americans are aware of terrorism, and fear it, not knowing that they are twice as likely to be struck by lightning, than to die in a terrorist attack on US soil... and we can thank the media for that. Politicians don't focus on that, because they are all too happy to collect military contracts for their constituents who help keep them in office.
You posting internet articles won't change a thing. Have to start a company that pays people the same price for not giving the Middle East weapons. For not emitting trillions of cubic feet of greenhouse gases. Any ideas?
You don't change systematic flaws overnight. and you don't attack the problem, you attack the cause. While you're fighting that problem, the cause is creating new ones. Fight poverty, which has a direct correlation to education levels. Quickest and cheapest way to fight poverty? End the failed war on drugs, and use the tax savings and possible tax revenue to boost education. And treat, rather than incarcerate. Most political capital that could be used to kick start real change, is wasted on lost causes. The Mueller investigation is the perfect example. I care if Trump is guilty, but I care about the cause, more than the problem. We have Trump, and Global Warming Deniers, and the Military Industrial Complex, because we waste our time and effort on the problem, not the cause.
I agree, but I know I need to display how $ can be made before throwing out ideological stuff that doesn't pay the bills. That's what it comes down to, not any kind of moral ground these industries pretend to care about solely for PR. Education and the war on poverty/drugs won't matter with unstable homes. Young women having kids they can't afford or have the emotional maturity to raise correctly. Young men gravitating to aggression, violence, drugs and no accountability. These are the REAL issues that are not addressed in regards to the issues you cited... why? Feelings could get hurt? Ironically you're pointing fingers at everyone but the source. Global Warming deniers are industrialists who's entire job and expertise revolves around global warming. People have voted with $ and their lifestyle is more important. Can you convince people to consume less and not just see life as "starter home", "starter car", "annual vacation", "kids gotta do this" etc. The systemic flaws all come down to the basics and principles that are universal. You have a capitalist nation that relies on gaming the uninformed and those with no financial leverage. And when you assume convenient non sequiturs like a person has to turn to drugs and alcohol because they don't have a job, that's stupidity. America has it's flaws and hurts those who make stupid decisions, but no country does a better job at rewarding those who make smart decisions..
There is crystal clear correlation between education spending, and a decrease in poverty. And the "young men gravitating towards aggression" is just bullshit propaganda. Violent crime is down over 50% since 1980, while our population has grown by more than 120 million. We are safer now than we've ever been. Most of our crime, is also tied to the war on drugs, which creates millions of single parent homes, and fatherless inner city kids. Those "universal principles" you are seeking are easily obtainable through education, and focusing on poverty. Both of which are intertwined.
People who don't do drugs are not victims of the war on drugs. Explain to me how the system is out to get drug abusers. Education will not help most of the poor rise out of minimum wage jobs. It's a bit of a false sell on your part ,especially with a large part of the middle class facing automation +china/india middle class in the coming years. Or will education lead to automatic 6 figure jobs, innovative tech startups, etc? Smart life decisions will help them a lot more.
You aren't serious, right? Ask the 50,000 innocent dead in Mexico due to cartel wars. Or, the thousands and thousands of innocent Americans caught in the crossfire of gang wars fighting for drug turf. Or how about the children of drug users and dealers who lose their parents to jail or death? Or what about kids born with defects from addicted parents? Or what about people who are robbed and murdered by those addicted to drugs trying to get money for their next score? The list goes on. The system is stacked against drug users, because any medical professional will tell you that addiction is a disease. You don't fight a disease with incarceration, you fight it with treatment. It is amazing, "treat rather than incarcerate" initiatives around the globe, including some in the US work with amazing results. Jailing drug users does nothing but produce a revolving door of inmates put into prison for non-violent crimes. Portugal has had amazing results since they decriminalized drugs in 2001. Seriously, this is the most asinine response I've ever read here... and that is saying a lot. You clearly have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. Countless crime statistics and medical studies are overwhelming proof of that. I literally had an MS-13 gang member killed on my doorstep two years ago over a drug deal gone wrong and my neighbors and I assisted his buddy who was also shot. But, I guess the PTSD that my neighbor has from having shots fired five feet from her door, and putting her hands over a bullet wound to stop the bleeding isn't a victim of the war on drugs.
