"The Obama Administration Should Be Found Guilty of War
Crimes in Yemen
HuffPost, Dan Kovalik, Updated Jan 05, 2017
Those of us who supported Barack Obama in 2008 in the hope
that he was a man of peace must face the painful reality —
we were dead wrong. Nowhere is our folly better illustrated
than in the ongoing human rights catastrophe now unfolding
in Yemen with critical U.S. assistance.
For months, those who bother to care about Yemen — one of
the poorest countries on earth — have been criticizing
President Obama for aiding and abetting the Saudi Coalition
assault on that country. As Foreign Policy reported back in
October, Obama was already being accused of committing War
Crimes through his logistical assistance to the brutal Saudi
air offensive against Yemen.
Yet, undeterred, Obama doubled down on his crimes in
November by approving the sale of $1.29 billion in smart
bombs to Saudi Arabia — a sale which, among other things, is
intended to replenish Saudi Arabia’s arsenal in attacking
Yemen.
Of course, as always, the U.S. mainstream media, which is in
the most sorry state I have ever witnessed it, has been
ready to lend a hand to Obama’s crimes by (1) barely
reporting on Yemen; and (2) reporting Yemen as a more or
less equal battle between Houthi rebels and the Saudi-led
coalition. To be clear, this is not a an equal fight, for it
is the Saudis who are inflicting the disproportionate share
of civilian casualties through a U.S.-backed air campaign
against a country with no air defenses.
Thus, as News Week recently reported:
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
told the U.N. Security Council . . . that a Saudi-led
coalition’s military campaign in Yemen appeared to be
responsible for a “disproportionate amount” of attacks on
civilian areas.
Speaking at the council’s first public meeting on Yemen
since the Saudi-led bombing campaign began nine months ago,
Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein said he had “observed with extreme
concern” heavy shelling from the ground and air in civilian
areas of Yemen including the destruction of hospitals and
schools.
The toll on Yemen’s civilian population from the U.S.-backed
conflict is great, with Human Rights Watch reporting back in
October:
The war, and particularly the numerous coalition
airstrikes, has taken a terrible toll on civilians. As of
late September, the U.N. had documented that the war had
killed 2,355 civilians and wounded 4,862, the majority in
coalition airstrikes. In the nearly two dozen strikes that
we have investigated on the ground, we collected the names
of more than 300 civilians who died, many of them children.
And the civilian deaths continue. In the last few weeks
local authorities and activists in Yemen have reported that
coalition aircraft bombed two wedding parties, killing
dozens of civilians. While a proper investigation is needed
to establish the facts, our research shows that many
coalition airstrikes that have killed civilians violated the
laws of war.
However, these numbers do not even begin to reflect the true
extent of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen where literally
millions of civilians are being brought to the brink of
starvation by the conflict. As an obscure piece out of
Australia entitled, “Yemen is the Crisis That the World
Forgot,” reports:
Yemen, which is just south of Saudi Arabia, is one of
the poorest countries in the Middle East. Even before the
current conflict, it depended on imports for 70 per cent of
its fuel, 80 per cent of its food and 100 per cent of its
medicine. With its ports and airports closed by a military
blockade, very little of anything is available to civilians
now. Before the war, more than 10 million Yemenis were going
hungry but now many are facing severe food shortages.
Those numbers should be shocking. But the sad reality is
they are easy to ignore in Australia and in other parts of
the Western world. Yemen has a population of 24 million,
roughly the same size as Australia.
Now consider the fact that in Yemen there are 21 million
people who are in need of humanitarian assistance.
Yes, the Obama Administration is knowingly aiding and
abetting the Saudis in murdering millions in Yemen. This is
a fact. And, it is a fact which is quite ironic given that
the current Obama-appointed U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. is
Samantha Power — an individual who came to prominence
through her Pulitzer-winning book which condemned the West’s
failure to respond to genocide throughout the world. In the
case of Yemen, however, the genocide is not happening due to
the mere omissions of the West, and in particular the U.S. —
rather, it is taking place with the active support of the
U.S., including Power’s own intervention at the U.N. which
prevented any independent investigation of the Saudi crimes
in Yemen.
In other words, the Obama team, including Samantha Power
herself, have become exactly what Power herself once
condemned — co-conspirators in genocide. Indeed, Power’s
treachery at the UN looks a lot like the maneuvers carried
out by the Clinton Administration in 1994 (maneuvers
condemned by Power in her book on genocide) which resulted
in UN troops being drawn down in Rwanda at the very time
they were needed to prevent genocide.
And again, the U.S. media bears great responsibility in all
of this as well, for it is not true that the world has
somehow “forgotten” about Yemen. Rather, the world has been
shielded from the realities in Yemen by a media which has
now become a mere mouthpiece for the U.S. State Department.
Tragically, it is the poorest of the poor in Yemen who are
paying the price for the immoral foreign policy of the White
House and its compliant press."
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/obama-adminstration-guilt_b_8916380.html