The House on Thursday narrowly defeated a measure that would have banned the transfer of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia, but the closeness of the vote was an indication of growing congressional opposition to the conduct of the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led bombing coalition in Yemen.
The vote was mostly along party lines, with 200 Republicans – and only 16 Democrats – heeding the Obama administration’s urging to vote against the measure. The vote was 204-216.
“The Department of Defense strongly opposes this amendment,” said Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., chairman of the House Committee on Defense Appropriations, during floor debate. “They advise us that it would stigmatize cluster munitions, which are legitimate weapons with clear military utility.”
Cluster munitions are large shell casings that scatter hundreds or thousands of miniature explosives over large areas – often the size of several football fields. Some of the bomblets fail to explode on impact, leaving mine-like explosives that kill civilians and destroy farmland decades after a conflict ends.
Cluster bombs are banned by an international treaty signed by 119 countries, not including the United States. The United States opposed the treaty, and instead of signing it, adopted a policy that cluster bombs should never be used in concentrated, civilian areas.
Speaking in support of the amendment, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said Saudi Arabia has deliberately targeted civilians with cluster bombs. “Earlier this year, the Saudi-led coalition dropped cluster bombs in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa, specifically targeting known civilian neighborhoods,” he said. “One of the buildings hit was the al Noor Center for Care and Rehabilitation for the Blind, which also has a school for blind children. The destruction of the school and the injuries sustained by the children was unbearably gruesome.”
The coalition has also used U.S.-produced weapons to destroy markets, factories, and hospitals.
The vote came the day after one of the war’s key architects, Mohammed Bin Salman, the Saudi deputy crown prince and defense minister, met with lawmakers to discuss, among other things, “the threat posed by Iranian aggression in … Yemen, and the broader Middle East.”
Despite the defeat, human rights activists celebrated the closeness of the vote. “This is a big deal for the U.S.-Saudi Arabia alliance,” said Sunjeev Bery, Amnesty International’s advocacy director for the Middle East in the U.S. “More and more members of Congress are clearly getting tired of selling Saudi Arabia bombs when it is dropping them on civilians in Yemen.”
The vote comes at a time when the U.S.-Saudi alliance is facing unprecedented skepticism in the United States. Although the Obama administration has refused to publicly condemn the use of cluster bombs, Foreign Policy reported that the White House has quietly placed a hold on a transfer of CBU-105 cluster bombs. A bipartisan group of lawmakers is trying to place a complete arms embargo on the kingdom, until it stops deliberately targeting civilians in Yemen.
The Saudis faced further loss of support Thursday when Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the deputy crown prince of the UAE, announced on Twitter that the “war is over” for Emirati troops. The UAE had previously been one of the most active members of the coalition.
Top Photo: Yemenis inspect the damage at a sewing workshop that was hit by a Saudi-led coalition air strike in Sanaa on Feb. 14, 2016.
Sometimes stigma is a good thing. Genocide, nuclear war, cluster bombs, and forcible rape are all examples of things it seems fair to stigmatize as being bad.
Why are the Zionists who control the world allowing this to happen? The poor Saudis need our help supporting the Royal Family.
It is a war that includes many participants as all we know. Starting with the land owners to the countries that arm and support financially.
Moreover, keeping the Kingdom safe from the outside interference and influence, as Iran’s, is a major objective to keep the region stable.
Stigmatizing Muslims and gay and trans people is fine.
But stigmatizing cluster bombs? Oh, no, we can’t allow that!
It is mostly for the US’s benefit if the Middle east region is stable. The conflict between Iran and Saudi is not to be ignored. Iran’s constant interference and willingness to take control is not what Saudi nor the US want.
Mustn’t leave out Israel should we?
I hope the clusters find their way to that rat hole in very due time. And to all of the suppliers that make them. Fuck Israel to hell.
Iran’s interference? Wow, is your head ever screwed on backward. It’s U.S. interference. Iran acts in its interests in its own part of the world. Not that I support Iran, any religious country, or even any country, but the U.S. is the big bad actor here, along with their proxies of Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Turkey.
Can you deny Iran’s support for Houthis by providing them with financial aids, soldiers and weapons? Aren’t Houthis and Hizbullah are Iran’s proxies too?
In Yemen I support the Houthis above anyone else; they are clearly the least bad of all the groups fighting there. And the U.S. supported Ali Abdullah Saleh, an evil dictator who abused and oppressed his own people. Can you deny the U.S. supports Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Turkey, which are among the worst countries in the region in how they treat people and their geopolitics?
You are an imperialist America First person who thinks the U.S. can do whatever it wants around the world. The U.S. has no business in the Middle East or anywhere else, and is only there for resources, mainly oil. What those countries do is mainly their own business, and it wouldn’t be much of an issue here if the U.S. weren’t involved.
Aren’t they condemned armaments ? But of course no one will obstruct the actions or desires of the exceptional people .
It is becoming all too frequent that our legislators vote in the interests of foreign powers such as Israel and Saudi Arabia among others. Countries buy the weapons of war from out own Military/industrial/corporatists who then lobby for the sales on behalf of the warring nations.
We the people suffer the consequences of paying for all our troops, advisors, in nations around the world which creates the fear and anger toward our assistance in their civil wars. We sow the planet with armaments and then reap the wind as some of them fall into the hands of the alienated.
What is happening in Yemen is not a civil war. It became the land of betrayal unfortunately. Saleh, former dethroned leader of Yemen, intentionally sold some Yemeni regions to Al Qaeda in order for him to ensure harm and terrorism is happening, hence, he keeps getting the support of Western authorities to fight terrorism and keeps his chair. The same plan happened with Houthis too, his enemies, he made sure to empower them to keep his country unstable.
You can’t trust a man who puts his enemies in power. The ends justify the means for him I believe. The situation he puts Yemen into is not humane nor thoughtful, hence, the major threat that comes from the Yemeni conflict.
Know your war pigs!
Democrats voting for cluster munitions sales to foreign dictatorships:
House Armed Services Committee members
House Committee on Foreign Affairs
Others:
8 other Democrats did not vote on the measure. – Bass, Brown, Boyle, Fattah, Schakowsky, Scott, Takai, Wilson.
So the Rethugs voted for Obomba.hahahaha……
Trump for POTUS,and maybe his coattails will show the warmongers the door.
But our confused people here think he is the warmonger,when it is obvious its all the Zionist toads.
There can be no doubt which country leads the globe in state-sponsored terrorism – we have met the enemy and it is US!
Comparing Obama’s stance on weapons sales to Saudi Arabia to the text of his Hiroshima speech reveals what an utter clown he has become over the course of his presidency; as far as the Nobel Peace Prize, it’s as ridiculous as the one given to Henry Kissinger. Here’s what he said in Hiroshima:
Notice his “barrel bombs” line, thrown in to justify his Syria policy, but no mention of “cluster munitions” since he was busy selling those to Saudi Arabia? Let alone the gross hypocrisy of initiating a $1 trillion nuclear weapons ‘modernization’ program while deploring the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. What a hypocritical jackass – he’s overseen the biggest weapons sales to the Saudis ever conducted by the United States, far more than GW Bush oversaw. Of course, that was mostly about maintaining global arms sales and profit margins for Wall Street investors in Lockheed, Northrup, Raytheon etc. as the U.S. involvement in Iraq was scaled down.
Just a week after Hiroshima, Obama gave a remarkably different imperial militaristic speech at the Air Force Academy:
The most peaceful period? Blessed? What BS. It’s obvious that the U.S. imperial project has been a disaster in Iraq and Syria and Libya, that Afghanistan was a failure, abandoned so Bush & Cheney could grab Iraqi oil in 2003 (civil war, Obama calls it), that Obama-Clinton-Kerry team’s regime change efforts in Libya and Syria were major debacles that aided the rise of ISIS and created a massive European refugee crisis that has ripped the EU apart and led to the rise of far-right neo-Nazi political groups, who like ISIS are now conducting violent attacks – is this what Obama calls “diplomatic resolution of problems” and “peace & prosperity”? What an idiot.
Obama’s foreign policy disasters are perhaps not quite as bad as GW Bush’s, but very little has changed – and the Republicans only response is to complain that he’s not militaristic enough. It’s no wonder that neither party wants to talk about foreign policy this election season.
Absolutely correct. When Obama became President, nothing really changed. It was the same limo. Same passengers. Giving the same directions. Only difference was there was now a black chauffeur.
Driving Miss Doomsday.
Obama is a massive disappointment. He is completely detached from the serving the public. His “community” is now composed of Bankers, the MIC, and Health Insurance Corporations, etc. As such he has redefined his role as a “Community Organizer”.
http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/en-gb/the-treaty/treaty-status.aspx
This is what voters need to hold their representatives/POTUS elect to…and DEMAND CHANGE.
At least it’s not the dreaded “barrel bombs”.
When she’s not dewily glorified as someone who looked pretty in tiaras she’s dismissed as an self-pitying airhead, but Princess Diana campaigned to ban the use of land mines and cluster bombs. She must have really worked very hard to get away from the kinds of “teach kittens to read” campaigns usually reserved for the wives of the powerful.
Unrelated to the article but worth posting is Glenn’s op-ed in the Washington Post today:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/17/the-fbi-was-right-not-to-arrest-omar-mateen-before-the-shooting/?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-e%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
The wiki plot from Needful Things:
I think the culture of sensitivity has progressed too far when legislators are afraid to act for fear of stigmatizing cluster munitions. I understand, when it comes to bombs, ‘trigger words’ are a sensitive topic, but bombs need to learn not to explode over the slightest micro-aggression.
I know that other bombs mock cluster munitions for dispersing over a wide area and having no clear target. Bombs maintain a macho culture which emphasizes total explosive power. So cluster bombs tend to suffer from feelings of inadequacy, often leading to social isolation in the bomb world which can even develop into self hatred. But the answer isn’t for legislators to treat cluster munitions with kid gloves, out of a well meaning but ultimately self defeating fear of stigmatizing them. A safe space for bombs is just an oxymoron, in my opinion. If cluster munitions are the wrong bomb for the job, tell it to them straight and let them learn to deal with it.
Excellent! But I wonder why we did not offer the Saudis our inventory of B53 bombs rather than going through the expensive ordeal of dismantling them. It would have turned a loss into a tidy profit. And moreover, just a couple of them would have ended rebellions and other wars in Yemen for generations.
Or alternatively we could sell them some B83s. Although much less potent than the B53, they still offer the advantage of shutting up those critics who like to parade around photographs of devastated market places and the like.
Reading this comment by Mr. Johnson made me wonder how many casualties the Saudis caused in this bombing. Ryan Devereaux said this at the time:
Then about a week and a half later, Human Rights Watch said 4 people were injured but also pointed out that the Houthis were basing its militia forces in the compound, endangering everybody:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/01/13/yemen-houthis-endangered-school-blind
Hank Johnson said children sustained unbearably gruesome injuries. He doesn’t seem to know what the hell he is talking about, which I guess isn’t too surprising coming from the man who thought the existence of a military base in Guam would “capsize” the island! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cesSRfXqS1Q
But what’s Alex Emmons’ excuse for not pointing out the falsehood of his statements? TI seriously needs an editor/fact-checker. It is getting ridiculous
Meanwhile, members of Congress can smell the blood in the water (HRC’s “nomination”) and are pushing for open war against Syria in support of Al Q’aeda, er… uh… “moderate rebels”. What happens if there’s a neocon controlled house and senate with a neoliberal hawk in the White House? Clinton will have a field day with her unsavory allies (House of Saud, etc.).
“The United States opposed the treaty, and instead of signing it, adopted a policy that cluster bombs should never be used in concentrated, civilian areas.”
As positive as this incredibly small step in the right direction is, sub-munitions deployed in rural areas are much more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to detect and remove than even from urban ruins. Additionally, as they are often deployed in agricultural regions, they deny farmers the use of a considerable acreage of arable land necessary for post-conflict economic rebuilding.
Exactly. The DoD’s opposition to the sale to Saudi Arabia in just spin, nothing more. They are still digging up unexploded CBUs in Vietnam, and undetected ones are still exploding there, four decades after we stopped dropping them.
The focus on the military on the short term (win the battle, win the war) was undoubtedly appropriate in the days when weapons were crude. But even as early as World War I the situation changed, with the introduction of munitions that could lie around for long periods before activating, chemical weapons that poison the air, water and soil, and now radioactive munitions such as DU penetrators. Although the US is not alone in developing these terrible weapons, we stand in the forefront in their use and export. It should be stopped, but it goes against the grain of the military to do so, and as we have repeatedly seen, Congress lacks the morals to impose bans.
No worries – Obama will be traveling to Yemen next week to meet with the families of women and children killed by US- and UK-made cluster bombs – the White House released these comments:
He then attacked himself for not doing enough to prevent arms sales to mentally unstable foreign regimes . . . “I call on all Americans to lobby their Congressmembers to prevent me from conducting such arms sales,” he said. “Otherwise, we’ll have more tragedies like these.”
I’m curious about which munition the Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama prefers to use to dispatch terror suspects–drones or cluster bombs. It’s a tough choice. Do you go with the more powerful drones, or do you stick with the exciting cluster bombs that cover a lot more area, thus covering the peace?
Politicians are pretty useless when it comes to integrity. The one thing about Trump is that he prances his unconsciousness around for all to see, while the others put up a pretense of consciousness. The government is like a toxic waste dump of human beings.
Lying HRC will not speak about the war crimes she allows israel to commit.
Lying HRC will not speak about the war crimes she is promoting in Saudi Arabia.
Hillary, just another wannabe war criminal?
hmmm. Maybe she had a fling with kissinger.
Translations: Democrats love military adventures and weapons sales that are led and/or promoted by fellow Democrats.
Bipartisan cheer: “Murka, fuk yeh!”
Although it was a little confusing, my reading of that quote is that only 16 Democrats voted the way Obama wanted them to. The rest either did not vote or voted FOR the cluster bomb ban. So while your statement may have some truth in general, in this case it is wrong.
vote was mostly .. party lines, with 200 Republicans – and only 16 Democrats – heeding the Obama administration’s urging to vote against the measure.
Your confused.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Obomber WANTS our Saudi PROXIES to CONTINUE to CLUSTER BOMB YEMEN, where Obomber himself used the same weapon, prior to the Saudis using USA provided airplanes and bombs to do the same.
Obomber, a real progressive!
I agree, those 16 democrats must have drawn the short straws or rep. a district so contorted by gerrymandering the dems feel they can never lose it.
What a fine example of “American Vales” that we bring to the world with our bombs that explode upon the innocent.
Today is a fine day in that the most corrupt members of the US Congress almost, or pretended to almost, vote for something that could be interpreted as moral.
Judging from another TI headline, the blind kids don’t even have to leave home. The US-backed Saudi coalition will bring the bombs to them.
HRC is america’s war weapons makers best friend.
!!!!!!
There was a bill a couple years back concerning H-1B visa program and into which bill was inserted a ‘special clause’ that would permit israeli nationals to OWN WEAPONS PLANTS IN THE US.
i cannot find the reference for this any more (hmmm) but it did pass and i strongly suspect that some israeli owns this illegal weapons thing.
CAN SOMEONE GET LINK TO THAT?
Sorry to spoil your wonderful anti-Semitic rant, but the US has been building cluster bombs for at least sixty years. US industry managed it using the investment of the US taxpayers, and did not need any help at all from Israel in this particular adventure in immorality.
Defenders of Israel expose themselves as anti -American Zionist trolls.
Did President Obama really urge Congress to vote against this bill? I couldn’t find evidence to support this online. I found an article from Mother Jones saying that President Obama is stopping the sales of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia. But that article was from May 31, 2016. Thanks in advance for any clarification you can provide on this. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/obama-administration-cluster-bombs-saudi-arabia-yemen
Hi Clif,
You’re right to spot the contradiction. Foreign Policy reported in May that President Obama placed a temporary hold on a scheduled shipment of CBU-105 sensor-fuzed weapons (cluster bombs). At his discretion, he could lift that hold, and allow future transfers. But Rep. Conyers’s amendment yesterday would have blocked all future shipments of cluster weapons to Saudi Arabia, regardless of what the President wanted. As Rep. Frelinghuysen said (and I quoted), “The Department of Defense strongly oppos[ed]” it.
Since the main concern is bad PR for this type of weapon, someone in the House should have offered an amendment allocating a couple of billion dollars for an ad campaign extolling their virtues…
… maybe paid for by a tax on imported oil or weapons exports?
There’s a guy who makes ads for Trump who may be a perfect fit for the effort.
Willie Warhead was a character created by the brilliant political cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty in his Washingtoons series. DEPLOY WILLIE! again…
Sending more weapons to the Middle East is creating chaos not making the situation better. Its only a matter of time before Americans stop asking what are we doing there in the first place and switch to lets get the hell out of there. We even see sentiments of the latter in the Trump campaign.
Not at all Mr. Dave.
Houthis who are supported by Iran are the chaos. Stopping them from what they are doing or causing is going to make the situation better and the region to be more stable.
Thank goodness Obama isn’t a republican!
What a lousy pretense!
Not to worry, Hillary will probably get a Nobel prize before the
inauguration to help give her cover too.
What is the difference between America today and Nazi Germany other than the US hasn’t reached the 6 million mark yet?
…that we’re aware of.
“The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.
But the victims are not just from big nations or one part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller ones which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.
The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.”
See http://www.countercurrents.org/lucas240407.htm
thank you for that info
I’ve always considered Kissinger, and his responsibility for millions of deaths globally, the American Hitler/Stalin. The major difference being that he killed people globally, and not within “his” country, the United States. With the increasing brutality and bloodlust of neoliberal democrats and their craven war against the social contract the American people are left with no alternatives but to drop out of the system or start from scratch. This system cannot be reformed.
And, IMO, the US deserves a significant portion of the blame for the genocide committed in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. That would add up to 1.5 million to your total.
But since in most of these cases we did not directly kill all the victims ourselves, our citizens and political leaders absolve themselves of blame for the killings, arguing that it is one thing to murder people, and quite another to merely set off the chain of events that led to the murders, or to provide the murders with weapons. The NRA even has a slogan for it: Guns don’t kill, people do. One could argue on that basis that Hitler was not responsible for the murder of millions of Jews, Roma, Sindhi, communists, socialists, handicapped and mentally deficient people, because he, personally, never killed a single one.
You forgot Mozambique, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Palestine, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Just off the top of my head. Mozambique was a big one, about a million dead there alone.
Thank you for the additions.
Mayb not directly but indirectly they can not b far away!!!
The person (mis)representing my district, Bost, also voted against the ban. Luckily here in the IL-12th Congressional district the Green Party is relatively strong, and we’re likely to get our candidate into the congressional debates later this year, especially since she has been in the last two elections’ debates. She’ll call him out on this vote.
The main question is whether people care that our country is dealing in weapons that most of the rest of the world has banned. Sadly I’m not too optimistic at this point, but I would like to be proven wrong.
The Declaration for a RENEWED AMERICA must be made upon writ and signatory thereof. Someone needs to call for the new continental congress to convene of by and for the people.
And many points must be declared including special duties of elected persons with immediate recourse available to people, not lawyers, and leadship by example.
THIS MUST HAPPEN.
“THIS MUST HAPPEN”
If it happens the way you envision it OK. It could also happen in a way that could even tighten the reigns of the current business plutocracy.
See http://dennisloo.com/Articles/princeton-and-northwestern-study-the-us-is-an-oligarchy.html
OMFG…
The House on Thursday narrowly defeated a measure that would have banned the transfer of cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia,…
==translation==
The US house of congress promotes and allows the sale of illegal weapons to THE COUNTRY SUSPECTED OF FUNDING THE HIT ON THE WTC.
How many crimes is that?
Can the persons of the house of congress each be charged with a war crime or a crime against humanity?
If not, can they now pass laws allowing toture chambers in the US, dissappearing people (ndaa), funding for genocide against Palestinians, theft of american values and properties by wallstreet, revocation of democratic voting rights, and any other criminal acts?
ps. thank you Alex Emmons for this incredible eye-opener. Without the efforts of TI, Americans would be left in the dark.
Saudi’s won’t have to worry much longer, their paid-for candidate will be president soon.
There is no way HRC will be POTUS.
Well, on the plus side, the blind children can’t see the pretty little bomblets in order to pick them up and play with them.
can you believe this stuff?
(dont forget, more calcium, higher pH)
And the blind children can’t avoid kicking the pretty little bomblets.