All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Andrea Prasow.
She is the Washington Director of Human Rights Watch, and they've run this really important piece by her about Yemen over at Foreign Policy in Focus.
That's fpif.org.
It's called U.S. War Crimes in Yemen.
Stop looking the other way.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Andrea?
I'm great.
Thanks for having me.
Ro, I'm really happy to have you here on the show, and this is absolutely the most important thing in the world, the worst thing in the world, is the American-Saudi war in Yemen.
I know you're not supposed to call it that.
It's the Saudi-led coalition and all of that, but I know a reporter from Sanaa, Nasser Araby, and he says they'll call it the American war.
They're under no illusion whatsoever about who's the empire and who is the satellite state here, the client state in the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
But it is, I guess, supposedly Saudis flying American jets here and waging this war for the last more than five years, almost five and a half years now, I guess.
So there's actually important news, not so much about the war, of course, there's airstrikes every day and all of that, but there's important news in terms of politics and power and law in D.C.
There have been two major reports, I think the first was the New York Times, and then there was a follow-up, I forget now, I'm sorry, in the Post, I guess, about the State Department being very concerned in the Obama years as well as in the Trump years that they could go to prison for war crimes, that what they're doing is illegal.
And apparently, I think, the Times said that the lawyers in the State Department wrote out the memo, but then they didn't pass it to the boss because they weren't sure what to do or whatever, but they were at least afraid.
So I guess I wonder what you make of that, that there's actually the shadow of accountability in Washington, D.C. for what's been going on here?
Well, you know, in some ways, it's both surprising and unsurprising.
It's not surprising that lawyers would have written up those memos because it's so clear that the U.S. faced a potential legal risk, largely because of selling weapons, but also because of participation in the war.
But it is also surprising that they did that and that it didn't really go anywhere.working for the State Department or the Defense Department should be informed if their conduct puts them at risk for legal liability.
Well, and does it?
After all, it is the Saudi-led coalition, they say, all we did was send them a bunch of weapons and apparently intelligence officers and contractors to help them coordinate the whole thing.
Well, there's enough of a risk that they wrote the memo.
There's enough of a risk that a former Defense Department lawyer several years ago wrote a blog post, you know, raising this concern.
There's enough of a risk that former State Department lawyers have said, yeah, I would definitely be concerned.
And there's enough of a risk that lawmakers have been asking these questions and not getting any answers to it.
Yeah.
In fact, you know, this really should be mentioned that the Senate, unbelievably, you know, in a historic fashion, multiple times have passed war powers resolutions, you know, under the 1973 act, they're trying to force an end to this thing, although they could just defund it and they don't do that.
Well, yeah, but they've also, you know, it's important that that Congress twice has voted to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia, a bipartisan Congress, so Democrats and Republicans, and twice President Trump has vetoed that and said, no, we're going to go ahead and send the weapons.
Right.
And in vote, you know, I'm sure Obama used to say the quiet part quiet, but Trump doesn't bother.
Trump says, do you know how much money we're making off of this war?
And then he exaggerates it by about 100 times.
Yeah, you know, that's a key part of it.
And you know, that's not my core as a human rights person.
But I think it's really important to note that some of these weapons deals are for the manufacturer of the weapons in Saudi Arabia.
So there aren't any American jobs.
There's American profit in terms of the companies, but the jobs potentially will be in Saudi Arabia.
And then as far as, you know, war crimes, that does go to motive, right?
He doesn't even pretend to be afraid that Iran is establishing a beachhead and that jeopardizes American security somehow or any kind of thing.
He just invokes money.
Well, I do think that Trump aside, I think that there are people in the U.S. government who really believe that U.S. participation in this conflict improves outcomes.
But you know, at some point you have to take a look and say the outcome is civilians are being slaughtered and war crimes are being committed.
Maybe the U.S. shouldn't be taking part in this.
And that's what members of Congress keep saying.
One of their primary reasons for not wanting to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia is because of the civilian casualties.
Right.
So there's a new report out today.
I have an email out to them.
It's the Norwegian Refugee Council, and they've counted 900 airstrikes and shelling attacks on farms in three years.
And this is something that Martha Mundy from the London School of Economics has covered in depth as well as the deliberate assault for years on end now against the very food supplies of the civilian population, especially the north of the country.
So that's really where the rubber meets the road here.
And the important point of all of this is we've got real human beings suffering here.
I was wondering, is there an official Human Rights Watch assessment of, you know, how bad it is, how illegal it is, that kind of thing?
Well, we don't count up every strike.
There are some great organizations that do that kind of work.
Our analysis is that we look at individual events and we take testimony.
And time and time again, we're documenting what we believe are war crimes.
And time and time again, we're documenting an utter lack of accountability.
The coalition sometimes will do an investigation.
They don't find people responsible.
They don't conclude that civilians were killed.
They say, you know, we weren't in the area at the time, and so on.
And we certainly don't see any real accountability push from the U.S. or from other supporters.
The U.S. isn't saying to the Saudis, we're not going to sell you weapons because you keep bombing civilians.
Instead, the message they get is, we're going to keep selling you weapons regardless of how many civilians you kill.
What do you make of the different assessments of, you know, and estimates of the death toll there among supposed fighters versus civilians, this kind of thing?
Well, I will say that around the world where the U.S. is engaged in military activity, U.S. assessments of civilian casualties and human rights groups and independent assessments of civilian casualties frequently differ, and they differ significantly.
There are a lot of reasons why that's the case.
Sometimes there is a disagreement between, say, us and the U.S. about who is a civilian.
And I think that's a huge challenge.
You know, but what we've seen time and again is that the Saudis and other members of the coalition, the UAE and others, are not taking seriously their obligations under the laws of war to investigate.
And if you don't investigate and you don't find out what went wrong, you can't make sure it doesn't happen again.
Well, and of course, there's always the discrepancy between, you know, directly dropping a bomb on somebody's head versus blowing up their grain silo and their flock of sheep in the field.
And then, you know, the results that come from that of people dying of deprivation due to, you know, deliberate infrastructure attacks, the marketplace, the fuel depot, the hospitals and this kind of thing.
Right.
So it makes it very hard to estimate.
I mean, they're deliberate attacks and they're also just the reality of the conflict.
You know, most people are dying in Yemen because of famine, which sometimes is the result of deliberate withholding of aid and sometimes is just the result of being already one of the world's poorest countries that's then been mired in five years of war.
And then you add COVID-19.
So you're dealing with just a really, really tragic situation.
The humanitarian situation is so grave that, you know, it's pretty clear that unless things change significantly, millions more Yemenis will continue to suffer.
And has cholera been real bad again this season?
Yeah, it's always, you know, it's always a challenge.
And there are a lot of really great humanitarian actors who are trying hard to address this.
But when you have this conflict and, you know, we're not opposed to the conflict.
Countries can choose to engage in wars, but when they do so, they have to do so following the laws of war.
They have to be accountable.
They can't target civilians if they do, or if they have a disproportionate attack.
They have to hold people to account.
And we just haven't seen that.
Hey guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military-industrial complex and the power elite after World War II, during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
Find it in the right-hand margin at scotthorton.org.
So, you guys don't take a position on the war itself?
Whether it should be fought or not, or whether it's legal or not, or anything like that?
That's right.
And is that the same with all the wars?
We don't take a position on the legality of armed conflict.
So we don't say a country should or shouldn't invade.
You know, we don't call for peace, but we don't call for war.
What that lets us do is examine the conduct of all the parties.
So I want to be clear too, right now we're talking about U.S. assistance to the Saudi-led coalition.
But we've documented human rights violations and laws of war violations by all parties to the conflict.
By the coalition, by the Houthis, by other non-state actors.
This is a pretty dirty war by all sides.
Right.
Now, I know, I'm not sure if it was you guys, I think it was, that you talked about how the Houthis had laid these massive fields of landmines outside of Aden in years past and that kind of thing.
But I notice in your article that you mention allegations of the Houthis' restrictions on aid delivery.
And so my understanding is that virtually everything getting into the north at all in terms of imports is coming through Hodeidah.
And they're constantly dealing with the Saudis, you know, interdicting, supposedly inspecting, but really just delaying the food long enough to rot and all this kind of thing.
And that's when they're allowing anything in at all, trade or foreign aid or anything.
But I have not heard very much about whenever that aid actually is delivered, the Houthis then refusing to allow it to be distributed to the people.
What's that about?
Yeah, it's, I mean, it's really unfortunate that that's a part of this conflict, again, on all sides, deliberately withholding access to humanitarian aid.
I can't speak to the strategy for the parties doing that, but, you know, aside from a huge humanitarian issue that can also be a war crime under certain circumstances.
But as I said, this is a really ugly war.
There is never, I guess there's never a war that isn't ugly.
Civilians always suffer the most in war, but that's why there are rules governing the conduct of parties to try to minimize that impact on civilians.
And when you see the parties not following those rules and you see in this instance, the U.S. continuing to support a party that is breaking those rules, that's really troubling.
And I see here, you have a whole other study about deadly consequences, obstruction of aid in Yemen during COVID-19.
So I'll have to look at that.
Yeah, unfortunately, this is a really rich area.
If you want to look at human rights abuses, take a look at Yemen.
Right.
And, you know, in the larger narrative of the war, I've been asked this before about, well, who are the good guys and the bad guys in this?
And the only obvious answer to me is that the good guys are the innocent civilians and the bad guys are all of the armed factions.
Is that about fair enough?
Well, you know, I think that there are, I guess one could say there are good reasons and bad reasons to go to war.
I think that the people living in Yemen have all sorts of interests and motivations, just like people do anywhere else in the world.
But as I said before, only civilians suffer the most in war.
That is absolutely the case in Yemen.
It's the case everywhere.
But the situation for civilians is particularly brutal in Yemen right now.
Yeah.
And then so what about the COVID outbreak?
I mean, obviously, there's hardly any clean drinking water and that kind of thing.
Do you have any kind of, I mean, I guess there must be some numbers.
Do you have any estimate how accurate they might be or what they even are?
I don't know.
I don't have my area of expertise, but I do know that it's really contributing to the crisis.
And when you have people who are already in a fragile state because of famine, you know, already there was reduced access to food.
A lot of people were food insecure in Yemen before the conflict and without access to adequate health care.
As we've noted, sometimes even hospitals are being bombed.
It really exacerbates the situation.
You know, I don't know if you've ever been to Yemen, but if you think about what you see on the streets of the U.S. in terms of even the access to masks, you know, your fancy handmade masks that a neighbor threw together, things like that, we're talking about a very different environment where people just don't have access to the PPE that is needed.
They don't have access to enough medication for regular problems that they had before.
You know, there've been issues with getting people out of the country for medical aid during this war and all of that was before COVID.
So it's just really exacerbating the situation.
It's quite dire.
And so now, I mean, obviously there's been a lot of grief that's come from America's wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and all of the rest of this.
But do you guys find that this really is different in the sense that the most, well, I don't know, Iraq war one, it was really, you know, announced that it was deliberate like this, but where they're really just outright targeting the water, the sewage, the electricity, the cholera hospitals, the flocks of sheep in the field, this kind of thing where this is really, you know, not just very illegal, but very criminal to have a policy directly targeting the civilians like this, almost undeniably targeting civilians in this way, right?
Well, there are cases, there's certainly allegations of deliberate targeting of civilian objects.
I think that there are a lot of other factors at play, including just sometimes not being very good at targeting, maybe not checking the lists, the no strike lists that they have, maybe just not caring enough to make sure that they don't hit civilian targets.
But I wish I could say this was unique to Yemen.
It's not, you know, there are, right now in Afghanistan, civilians are being attacked again by all sides.
So this is really a serious problem in war.
My job, since I focus on the U.S. government, is to point out when the U.S. government is contributing or doing this.
And Yemen is one of those cases where that's something that we do have to point out.
The U.S. is not the primary actor, of course, the Saudi led coalition is, but continued support by the U.S. really sends a powerful message to those actors that they can go ahead with business as usual.
Right.
Well, but I mean, like even in Afghanistan, I'm not trying to spin for him.
It just seems like this is even worse is all I'm saying.
But if Afghanistan is the benchmark, they bomb a civilian home.
But then they say, well, but that was a Taliban heroin factory.
And so it was a military target.
And if some women and children died, well, those are just the breaks.
That's essentially, you know, and here's fifteen hundred dollars for your condolence payment.
That's the narrative.
That's the story.
Whereas here, it seems like they don't really have an excuse.
They're quite deliberately targeting civilians.
I mean, for example, to make I don't know if we have quotes like this, but we have quotes from Iraq War One, right, where the Air Force and even Colin Powell and then talk to The Washington Post and told The Washington Post, yes, we are deliberately targeting the electricity, the water, the sewage.
We're trying to make life miserable for these people because it's their fault.
Saddam Hussein is their dictator.
And if they overthrow him, then we'll stop this kind of thing where it was outright declared war against the civilian population.
They admitted it.
And I don't know if we have admissions like that here, but it seems like we have that very same policy here where this is as opposed to Iraq War Two, where in Iraq War Two, they didn't go around deliberately blowing up the water and everything.
They were occupying the place and trying to rebuild it or whatever, you know, from their war.
Yeah, well, I think it's important to distinguish, first of all, that the U.S. is not the primary actor in Yemen.
I think that there's a pretty clear case for potential liability, but the U.S. is not the one dropping the bombs, unlike in Iraq or in Afghanistan.
It's still not always the U.S., although sort of clear assistance.
But I don't think we've seen those kinds of statements from the Saudis.
And I just want to be clear that there are violations by all parties.
It doesn't make one set of violations better.
But all the parties have disappeared.
People have tortured them in custody, have committed summary executions.
There are really a range of violations.
It's a very, very ugly war.
And as we've said, you know, the civilians are the ones suffering the most.
Yeah.
And now, well, so it's been a little while since we had, you know, up to date reporting on this, but at least in the first couple of years in the war, it was widely reported that the Americans had sent.
And I think this goes into the Trump years, certainly in the Obama years.
But I think this goes into the Trump years, too, reports that American military officer, you know, or, you know, employees, civilian and, you know, actual military intelligence officers, as well as all our contractors on, you know, licensed from the Americans as they're selling all the weapons.
They got Americans, you know, taking care of all the care and feeding of the jet fighters and everything over there, that 15s and really running the war for the Saudis.
And I wonder at what point, you know, calling it the Saudi led coalition or going along with that narrative is really just, you know, kind of plausible deniability.
Like when Ronald Reagan sold missiles to the Ayatollah, people didn't jump up and say, no, no, no.
It was Israel that sold the missiles because that that was just plausible deniability.
That was the cut out.
Yes, Israel sold the missiles, but it was in cooperation with the Reagan government.
And that doesn't distract us for a minute.
You know, same kind of thing here.
Right.
No.
Well, keep in mind that the U.S. is not the only government selling weapons to the Saudis.
France and the UK and others have also continued to do that.
And, you know, the U.S. was involved in a different way earlier in the conflict, including doing midair refueling of the Saudi jets.
When Congress voted to sort of ban those activities, the Trump administration itself stopped the midair refueling.
They do remain involved.
You know, I don't know the degree how many U.S. personnel are involved in developing target lists and so on in the conflict.
So there absolutely continues to be a role in terms of the actual prosecution of the war.
And then the weapons are sort of those two chunks of U.S. participation that are worth paying attention to.
And the weapons sales, I think, are the most remarkable ones because because you have these two bipartisan votes from Congress to ban the sale of weapons.
And because, you know, the Saudis both need the weapons, but also just see those sales as part of burnishing their reputation.
And the continued weapons sales sends a message to Mohammed bin Salman and his crew over there that the U.S. will support whatever they do.
Keep in mind, this is the same person who U.S. intelligence agencies have said ordered the killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, who was a journalist based in the U.S.
Same person, same outrage from Congress, same support from the Trump administration.
Yeah.
And, you know, just in case you're interested or for anyone in the audience, it's really worth bringing up that at the time that this started in March of 2015 would have been right then March or possibly April.
Patrick Coburn wrote a story for The Independent about how the domestic politics, you know, like in a public choice theory kind of a sense of Mohammed bin Salman, were really behind the start of the war.
At that time, he was the brand new deputy crown prince and the brand new defense minister, 29 years old.
And he had to start this war for internal palace intrigue politics there to solidify his place as the real crown prince, you know, coming up before he marginalized his cousin and took his place and all these things.
And that the Yemen war, Operation Decisive Storm was a big part of, you know, what was going on there.
So that's the interest that we're serving here really is the very kind of venal personal political interests of this crown prince, not even the national interests of Saudi Arabia, much less the United States.
Yeah, this war was supposed to be a feather in his cap.
He thought he could finish it off in six weeks or so.
And here we are, you know, nearly six years later.
Yeah, it doesn't seem to have hurt him that it wasn't so decisive of a storm there.
But anyway, not in terms of support from the US.
And so, you know, part of what we have working against us in terms of accountability, Andrea, obviously, is that partisanship here is working in the worst way, where neither side wants to make hay accusing the other side because they're equally guilty.
Trump has, you know, essentially doubled the war that Obama started and even Obama and Biden started.
And so that makes it difficult.
And yet Congress has been pleasantly activist on this war, you know, compared to a lot of other ones.
You know, Bernie Sanders and I guess Chris Murphy, who's bad on a lot of things, but he's been, you know, pretty good on this.
Ro Khanna has fought real hard on this.
I wonder whether there's, you know, like with these news stories coming out and that kind of thing.
Do you think there's pressure building for any kind of movement on this?
Maybe it would be good politics for the Democrats to come out against Trump's very worst war, you know?
You know, it took some time to get Congress really interested.
There were votes on arms sales, they're called resolutions of disapproval, before that didn't pass.
And gradually we gained more and more momentum.
And a big part of it was actually the Khashoggi killing, which is good in that it focused attention on what Mohammed bin Salman's regime was doing.
It's unfortunate that it took that to really turn a lot of people's attention to Yemen and the civilians who were suffering there.
But it did.
So we'll take that.
But for a long time, Yemen was really called the world's forgotten war.
You know, it's usually when people say Yemen, they say Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland because his family was from there.
That's sort of all Americans ever would have heard about Yemen in the last few years.
So I'm glad that we're at the point where we're having this conversation, where Congress is having this conversation publicly.
They're they're asking questions and hearings.
But so far, we haven't seen a change for the people in Yemen.
And that's what we'd really like to see.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you so much for covering this important story and for your time on the show, Andrea.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
OK, guys, that is Andrea Pressout, and she is the Washington director of Human Rights Watch.
And check out this very important story.
It's at Foreign Policy in Focus, fpif.org.
It's called U.S. War Crimes in Yemen.
Stop looking the other way.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org, and Libertarian Institute dot org.
