There are, of course, people who identify with the image of America as a
military power. You know who Nolan Crabb is, right? He druns the DB Review
list. When he reads nonfiction, it tends to be nonfiction about WW2, that
glorifies the role of the US and its allies. Or he reads about our past
presidents or generals or battles.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, March 23, 2018 10:28 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Pentagon Lies About Yemen, Says US Role in Saudi
War Is "Noncombat"
My tried and true method of determining when the Pentagon is lying, is to
listen. When you hear the official Pentagon releases, it's a 99.5% chance that
it's a lie.
And if the Pentagon is not talking, what we hear is the slopping sound of the
Military/Industrial Corporations slopping at the public trough.
Just how long will we allow it to go on before we demand our own representation
in the running of our nation? When will we wake up and realize that the big
lie was, "What's good for General Motors is good for the Nation"?
Just where has all that goodness gone? Not in the pockets of those Americans
who sweat and strained to create it.
Carl Jarvis
From Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Pentagon Lies About Yemen, Says US Role in Saudi War Is "Noncombat"
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
22 March 18
"The U.S. government claims that it's not engaged in hostilities
unless U.S.
troops are on the ground being shot at by the enemy.. It stretches the
imagination, and it stretches the English language beyond its breaking
point, to suggest the U.S. military is not engaged in hostilities in
Yemen."
- Senator Mike Lee, Utah Republican, Senate floor March 13
The Pentagon, having spent three years creating famine and spreading
cholera on an unprecedented scale in one of the poorest countries in
the world, Yemen, now lies, baldly but with lawyerly gracelessness,
that the American bombs guided by American officers to targets as
often as not civilian is somehow "noncombat." Effectively, the
Pentagon argues that when US military forces only enable genocide,
it's not combat. Strictly speaking, the Pentagon is only following
orders to commit ongoing war crimes.
In late March 2015, with US blessing from the Obama administration,
Saudi Arabia and its allies started bombing Yemen more or less
indiscriminately, making as many as 200 sorties a day. Yemen, with no
air force and few air defenses, was helpless. From the start this was
an illegal war of aggression, a nexus of war crimes in all its
particulars, and so it will be until it ends. Without US approval and
participation, it's highly unlikely Yemen would have become the
world's most serious humanitarian crisis, regardless of the crimes of others.
The gross criminality of US enabling of and participation in the
genocidal war on Yemen is not part of the official discussion of the
horror our country perpetuates on a daily basis. From the beginning,
US military has engaged in the war by providing tactical advice on
bombing, offering intelligence, maintaining warplanes, re-fueling
Saudi warplanes in mid-air, providing cluster bombs and smart bombs,
and generally offering military support for a bombing campaign as
vicious as any since the US dropped more explosives on Vietnam than were used
in all of World War II.
This is the official view of the scope of US involvement in the Saudi
war on Yemen, along with a perverse insistence on calling it a "civil
war," when there is only one outside aggressor: the Saudi coalition
and its supporters.
Even Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, accepts this
demonstrably false framing, as she did at the Senate Armed Services
Committee hearing on March 13. She even accepts as gospel the alleged
Iranian involvement in Yemen for which there is scant evidence and
less precise definition. That has been a chronic Saudi-American lie
about Yemen from the beginning, pretending that a local territorial
dispute between the Houthis and the Saudis was some sort of grand
geopolitical last stand. It wasn't true when Obama green-lighted the
killing, and it's not true now as Trump keeps the slaughter going, but
it will continue to be accepted as official truth until people like
Warren challenge it. But Warren is also the Senator from Raytheon, the
defense contractor that sells billions of dollars worth of
precision-guided munitions to the Saudi coalition.
Euphemistically,
Raytheon says it helps the Saudis "meet their security needs," even
though there is no serious threat to anyone from the Houthis in Yemen,
and the Saudi war is less about security then aggression.
The Pentagon says what it is doing with the Saudi war is "limited US
military support," in the words of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis before
the Senate on March 13. Mattis did not acknowledge that the Saudi war
could not continue without US support, since the Pentagon position is
that the US provides "noncombat assistance." None of the US senators
present asked about this big elephant taking a dump in the middle of
the room. There was only the slightest objection when the Pentagon
Central Command head who runs the American part of the war, General
Joseph Votel, told senators with a straight face: "We're not parties
to this conflict."
According to General Votel, the US is not party to the conflict even
though it chooses targets, programs smart bombs, and re-fuels bombers
that have now killed something like 10,000 civilians and an unknown
number of combatants.
General Votel claims US noncombatant status mainly because once the
bombs go up, the US pays no official attention to where they come
down.
In late February, three senators introduced Joint Resolution 54,
designed to put some Congressional check on US war-making in Yemen and
elsewhere. The Pentagon's official response was that Congress has no
right to tell the Pentagon what it can and cannot do under
presidential authority. This view is spelled out in a February 27
letter from the general counsel of the Department of Defense, opposing
Joint Resolution 54 and explaining why all the war-making activities
of US forces in Yemen have nothing to do with "hostilities" (even
though they do in any honestly rational world). The letter even refers
obliquely to actual "hostilities" that are mostly ignored, "the
October 2016 strikes against radar facilities in Houthi-controlled
territory in defense of US Navy ships in international waters." That's
the whole reference, but even as it confirms the US firing weapons at
Houthis, it then defends this engagement as an exception that somehow
doesn't count as "hostilities." Navy Times lists the Red Sea/Gulf of
Aden region off Yemen as one of the "Navy's 5 most dangerous at-sea
deployments." Navy Times frames the issue with a clear statement of
the hostilities and a hilarious version of the geopolitical history:
The fact that sailors have already had full-on missile battles with
Yemeni rebels near this global choke-point makes the Bab-el-Mandeb, or
the BAM, an obvious pick for the most dangerous place in the world
where sailors are deploying.
The Gate of Tears is the maritime equivalent of the Wild West. Yemen
is a failed state in the grip of a bloody civil war that has roped in
both Saudi Arabia and to a lesser degree, the United States. But
spillover from the conflict, as well as meddling from Iran, has made
the waters around Yemen extremely dangerous.
This is all duplicitous kabuki on both sides, Pentagon and Senate.
They are arguing within a falsely framed reality to perpetuate deceit they
all own.
Even if the US role were actually limited to merely supporting the
aerial attacks, everyone lies by omission by failing to acknowledge
(much less object to) the air campaign's role in blockading Yemen,
thereby directly causing famine and disease and toxic drinking water
for more than half the population. This biological warfare is also a war
crime.
The blockade of Yemen is also a land blockade along the Saudi-Yemeni
border in the north. To the east, the blockade relies on the desert
and the presence of al Qaeda and ISIS forces, also at war with the
Houthis. US Special Forces were operating in Yemen for years with the
blessing of Yemen's internationally-imposed "legitimate" government
headed by a Saudi puppet. When the Houthis, long a rebellious,
independence-minded minority, overthrew the imposed government in 2014, US
forces withdrew for awhile.
Now
the US operates in Yemen on a contingency basis, if not continuously.
As is well established in international law, a blockade is an act of war.
The "noncombatant" US admittedly participates in the aerial blockade
of Yemen. The US does not admit its much greater participation in the
naval blockade of Yemen. The US-Saudi naval blockade depends on the US
Navy, which has enforced the blockade since 2015. Yemen has needed to
import food to survive for decades. The US-Saudi blockade cut off food
to Yemen, as well as medical supplies, fuel, and all the other things
needed to support a normal civil society. The US-Saudi blockade has
led directly to starvation and famine. The US-Saudi blockade has led
directly to the spread of cholera and other diseases. The US-Saudi
blockade is a war crime of stunning enormity.
And no one talks about it.
When President Bashar al Assad engages in similar tactics in Syria, as
in Ghouta of late, the world hears about it, but doesn't do much. When
the US and its allies in the war on terror terrorize and destroy
places like Raqqa, the world hears much less about it and does
nothing. When the US, Saudi Arabia, and its allies spend three years
in Yemen committing war crimes that have yet to end, the world hears
little about it, humanitarian agencies and the United Nations raise
objections, but nothing humane is accomplished.
The
US in Yemen is morally indistinguishable from Bashar al Assad.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio,
TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the
Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of
America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine,
and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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