Enabling War Crimes: Mattis Admits US Planning Saudi Airstrikes in Yemen

Rasa - US Defense Secretary James Mattis has just offered new details about US involvement in the Saudi invasion of Yemen, providing specifics about what the US is doing that contradict long-standing claims of a very limited, non-combat involvement.

News ID: 437036

Date: 30 March 2018 - 22:07

RNA - Mattis now admits the US is “doing the planning in Yemen strikes, and has shown the Saudis how the concept of a no-strike zone is supposed to work, and engaged in a maturing process of battlefield management” intended to see Saudi strikes killing limited civilians. Mattis has also tried to spin the already established US involvement in mid-air refueling as beneficial for civilians being bombed!

Obviously all this means the US has been enabling Saudi war crimes in Yemen from day one, as US-backed Saudi airstrikes are still killing a shocking number of innocent bystanders, and the comments made by Mattis, some half-hearted attempts, cannot spin that criminal involvement:

That this makes the US government complicit in Saudi war crimes is beyond dispute. What’s shocking is that the UN Security Council is still looking the other way. Not only has the Council been unable to condemn this criminal involvement, it has even issued a statement expressing “grave concern” over a weekend incident in which Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah resistance movement fired several missiles into Saudi Arabia.

This statement of condemnation is particularly galling given that Saudi airstrikes have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians in the past three years since Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen, and the UN Security Council has never been able to successfully offer a statement faulting that. Indeed, the times the UN Security Council got close to faulting the Saudis were including them on a blacklist of nations that deliberately kill children in war. That inclusion led the Saudis to have a very public fit, and the UN to retract the claim, despite it being plainly accurate.

This reflects the Saudis having two key allies, the United States and Britain, as permanent members of the Security Council, and willing to veto anything that challenges their narrative too hard. The US and Britain have both been involved in the Saudi invasion directly, and are both selling the Saudis billions in arms for the conflict.

In the process, the Saudis have bombed schools, homes, markets and hospitals. At least 15,700 civilians have been killed and many more wounded since the start of the conflict in 2015, the majority by Saudi coalition airstrikes, according to the United Nations human rights office. The war and the blockade have driven Yemen to the humanitarian “brink,” with 7 million people facing starvation and more than two-thirds of the population in need of humanitarian aid. Both the US and Saudi Arabia have blocked and restricted critical international relief supplies from reaching civilians.

As acknowledged by Mattis, the United States is a party to this monstrous misconduct by providing direct support to the Saudi coalition, including refueling planes during bombing raids, intelligence, airborne fuel tankers and thousands of advanced munitions. International legal scholars and US lawmakers have warned that this continued US support - including through weapons sales - may not only make the US government complicit in coalition violations of the laws of war, but also expose US officials to legal liability for war crimes.

US officials providing assistance to be guilty of aiding and abetting coalition war crimes are aware of the fact that their aid is used to assist unlawful attacks against civilians, and that the Saudi forces they are assisting commit war crimes.

According to Fars News Agency, Many of these violations have been reported by the United Nations, as well as human rights organizations, and Defense Secretary Mattis cannot debate that with some half-hearted comments.

Mattis knows full well that US support to the Saudis makes US personnel criminally liable. The State Department’s top human rights officers have already conceded a “possibility of legal jeopardy for US officials if arms sales continue despite continuing evidence of violations of the laws of war.” The State Department officials have also maintained that as the armed conflict in Yemen continues and evidence of war crimes mounts, legal risk for US officials will only increase.

They are even pushing the Trump administration to curb weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and demand more transparency about how US munitions are used. Guess what? They should do the next best thing: Demand Washington to end its criminal involvement and exert pressure on Saudis to end their monstrous misconduct, a disgrace that brings shame to the global community. There is no mystery here. The Saudis cannot continue the war without the unconscionable assistance and complicity from the War Party in Washington – or the diplomatic impunity at the UN Security Council.

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