IN ITS ANNUAL human rights report on Saudi Arabia, the State Department ignored thousands of civilian casualties from the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen and overlooked the widespread use of illegal cluster munitions by the bombing coalition.
Saudi Arabia launched an air campaign in Yemen last March after Houthi rebels in Yemen threatened the rule of the Saudi-backed president. The Saudi military has been widely criticized for targeting civilians, destroying homes, schools, and hospitals, and using internationally banned cluster munitions.
The Obama administration has supported the Saudi-led campaign throughout, providing the coalition with intelligence and selling them at least $20 billion in weapons since the campaign began in March.
The report, which was released Wednesday and covers all of 2015, attributes to Human Rights Watch a report “that 13 people total were killed, including three children, in seven rocket attacks from April to mid-July.”
But Human Rights Watch also tallied more than 550 civilian deaths in 2015 from 36 airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition, and documented 15 attacks where the coalition used banned cluster munitions, according to Belkis Wille, the group’s Yemen researcher.
The group estimates that coalition bombing has killed a total of nearly 2,000 civilians since the war began.
And the Human Rights Watch report the State Department referenced specifies that Saudi forces used U.S.-made M26 cluster bombs in all seven attacks. Each rocket released more than 600 explosives, which spread out over miles. Human Rights Watch found that the U.S.-made explosives had scattered over fields “normally used for agriculture and grazing,” threatened “the livelihood of local farmers,” and badly injured at least three workers who stepped on them.
Cluster bombs are widely recognized as unlawful because their unexploded duds act like land mines, killing civilians years after the conflict. The United States is not among the 119 countries that have signed an international convention banning them.
Human Rights Watch accused the State Department of cherry-picking its research:
“The State Department report suggests that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International accused the Saudis of only 13 civilian deaths during the fighting,” said Wille. “The U.S. is presenting a small bite of the apple.”
Wille said that some of the unmentioned casualties could have been at the hands of other coalition members, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Egypt. “Saudi forces may not be implicated in all of them, but the coalition’s failure to investigate alleged unlawful attacks — as required by international law — has made it impossible to know for sure,” she said.
The State Department admitted to more civilian casualties in its report on Yemen, also released Wednesday. But the Yemen report only acknowledged four problematic air attacks and confirmed only 173 civilian casualties. The report included several estimates of civilian casualties killed by both sides in the conflict, but never attributed a percentage to the Saudi-led coalition.
On Wednesday, Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced legislation to temporarily block U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia until the State Department certifies that the Saudi military is taking all available steps to protect civilians. The senators joined a growing chorus of human rights and civil society groups calling for an arms embargo of the kingdom.
President Obama has approved more arms sales to Saudi Arabia than any other president. By 2015, his administration had approved more than $100 billion in weapons sales to the Saudis, and currently has approved $46 billion in new agreements.
A State Department spokesperson, who would only comment on background, pointed out that the U.S. has called on both sides of the conflict to protect civilians. He also claimed that the use of cluster munitions is not a human rights violation because the United States has not signed the ban on cluster munitions.
Top photo: John Kerry, center, standing next to Prince Saud al-Faisal, on his left, the late Saudi foreign minister, at a 2014 meeting of gulf state leaders.
Obama and Kerry should be put in front of a FIRING SQUAD for SELLING ARMS to TERRORISTS! Saudi Arabia is a TERRORIST COUNTRY.
To force Americans to PAY for this TERRORISM is to tell us that our corrupt government runs the country and not the constitution. Firing Squad should be the final end to Obama and Kerry. BOTH TERRORIST! Give back the Nobel PEACE Prize Obama. YOU DO NOT DESERVE IT! You deserve prison along with the rest of your corrupt TERRORISTS! Even Bernie lost me when he agreed to let you keep your kill list and said it was justified. I am jumping ship to Gary Johnson of New Mexico as a Libertarian. I REFUSE to SUPPORT MURDERS AND TERRORIST!
Our 2009 Nobel Peace Price winning president, ladies and gentlemen.
Were the subject matter of this article not so grim, I could laugh at the irony of his winning that prize for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people.”
Correction: Chris Murphy reps Connecticut.
(“On Wednesday, Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Calif., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced legislation to temporarily block U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia […]”)
We need the mass murdering to stop in Yemen! The victims do not have even sticks to protect themselves with. The Saudis and we are guilty of murder. Shame on you Barack Obama and John Kerry. NO, I am not a Republican, I am a Democrat. Outrage has no party, it is a feeling that comes from the inside.
The US is the evil leader in all of these horrific scenarios. Blame the Saudi’s for not doing what the most powerful nation on Earth wants when we are probably threatening to totally destroy their nation if they do not comply with our leader’s heinous actions abroad. America is the nation that cannot be trusted. It is an evil empire run by evil scum the likes of our world history’s worst monsters!! This is pure evil at its evilest!
The Saudis were created with the specific intention of acting as a proxy for British interests in the region during the breakup of the ottoman empire. The twentieth century erosion of British influence in the region has been managed by a century old transatlantic arrangement between the British and American governments that continues to recognize the importance of having an oil rich Sunni sultanate in their pocket. Like Israel, the Saudis understand their role in the region. Very recently, the Sauds have been making a serious effort to make their economy less dependent on their oil reserves; however their short-term strategy of attempting to acquire “greater market share” over global oil production has begun to undermine those efforts. They have had a serious downturn in their GNP which has reduced their credit worthiness in the eyes of transnational capital interests. Thus they are now being “advised” by the international banking community to cut public spending, introduce new taxes, and privatize a percentage of Saudi Aramco. Most importantly, a program of neoliberal cultural modernization is being emphasized in keeping with the continued integration of the Saudi-led GCC into the global marketplace.
David Fromkin, “A Peace to End All Peace”. Should be required reading.
A friend recently recommended that book to me but also directed me to this criticism as well:
http://original.antiwar.com/john-taylor/2012/07/15/deconstructing-a-peace-to-end-all-peace/
Do you see any merit in this criticism?
This is why the U.S. is no longer an honest broker and why the rest of the international community (the ones who are not vassal state clients) no longer trust or respect the words coming from the mouths of these hypocrite liars.
What good are Yemeni women and children who’ve done nothing wrong and don’t deserve to illegally be mass murdered if they’re still breathing?
Obama recently said his biggest mistake in office was not preparing for what could happen in Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown. . . bur he knows that’s BS.
His biggest mistake – at least in foreign policy issues – was deciding in 2011 to back the radical Islamic faction in Syria in coordination with Saudi Arabia and Qatar – i.e. the Al-Nusra Front and ISIS, or the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, or Daesh. The rationale was that these proxy forces could overthrow Assad and then somehow be brought under control by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Britain and Europe went along with, making no effort to stop the flow of disaffected Muslim youth from European ghettos to the ISIS forces.
Then it all went sour, in usual proxy regime change fashion – the ISIS fighters didn’t stay in Syria, they came back and launched terrorist attacks across Europe; a massive wave of refugees from the fighting flooded into Europe, and Russia had to come in and bomb ISIS oil tankers on their way to Turkey, making the U.S. look even more incompetent and mendacious – oh, well done, another neocon jackass move, but this one run by Obama, as was Libya. Huzzah, huzzah, huzzah!
If he’d been the least bit rational, he’d have instead backed the pro-democracy Arab Spring uprising – but no, that was out of the question; the protesters wanted to get rid of our ‘partners’ like the Saudi Royals, so the U.S. instead helped the Bahraini Royals crush their pro-democracy uprising, with some Saudi tanks, and now the CIA and NSA helps the pet dictatorships in the Middle East monitor social media so any future dissenters can be black-bagged, tortured and beheaded before they gain any traction in their quest for democratic reforms. Like something out of 19th century European colonial programs, the Belgian Congo, for example.
The evidence that the US was involved in shipping weapons to ISIS via Saudi Arabia and Turkey is extensive; the Iraqi army captured arms from ISIS such as Raytheon-made TOW missiles with their serial numbers arc-welded out:
“Indeed, it has been documented by an external monitoring group, the UK-based Conflict Armament Research, that the well-known CIA-Saudi program (publicly acknowledged to have begun in 2012) to transfer thousands of tons of weaponry to insurgents in Syria resulted in the arming of ISIS fighters.”
https://levantreport.com/2015/01/01/isis-is-now-deploying-us-supplied-tow-anti-tank-missiles-in-syria/
All that Obama can say now is “Well, we aren’t backing them any more, so why are you making a fuss about it? And the Saudis are our ‘partners’ so I can’t very well discuss the beheadings or the use of cluster bombs against civilians or whether or not they’re still allowing their wealthy citizens to covertly support ISIS, that would be bad manners!”
Oh, the idiocy, the stupidity, the short-sighted greed, the craven dipshit morons at the State Department. . . when will it ever end?
This has similarities to the Iran Contra scandal where President Reagan made bad deals that got innocent people killed (and flooded America with drugs).
This pattern of bad deals (TPP, KXL, FCC) is so common that every time we hear about a successful deal you have to ask, “ok, who’s getting the shaft on this one?”. It’s as if the devil in the details is a reflection of the devil making the deal.
latest example: House passes broadband bill despite promise of White House veto. The legislation “basically removes the authority of the FCC to take action on any complaints relating to overcharges, fees or other nasty practices that broadband providers may do to overcharge you.”
In other words, the telcos and cable cos want immunity from farmed out resellers lying to the public so that these cos can take your money without even an apology. IF this passes, the next law will be the right of the cos to bill Americans for their time on the phone complaining. And failing to pay a complaint charge will result in criminal prosection.
betme.
Not a lot different than wife beating syndrome.