For Pacifica Radio, April 11th, 2021.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and I'm the author of the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
And I can announce to you today that with the interviews I recorded on Friday, there are now 5,500 interviews, almost all on foreign policy, going back to 2003 for you at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
And I want to dedicate this show to our good friend, Reese Ehrlich, who died of cancer last week.
All right.
And now introducing Hassan El-Tayyab from the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Quakers Lobby for Peace in Washington, D.C.
Welcome back to this show, Hassan.
How are you, my friend?
Hey, thanks so much, Scott.
Happy to be here.
Great to have you here.
So there's still plenty bad going on in the war in Yemen.
And there's also a lot of good news in terms of activism going on in the United States here, trying to finally bring this thing to an end.
So please, sir, say everything that you have to say.
Well, thank you so much, Scott.
Really happy to be here.
The Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, and a coalition of 70 organizations, along with a bunch of celebrities, including one of my favorites, Mark Ruffalo, have sent a letter to the Biden administration demanding an immediate and unconditional end to the Saudi Arabia-UAE military blockade on Yemen, which is threatening the lives of millions of civilians and depriving people of food, fuel and medicine.
So a lot of great activism is going on.
At the same time, 76 members of Congress, led by Reps Dingell, Pocan and Khanna, have sent another letter calling for the immediate end to the blockade and really urging Biden to speak out and use his bully pulpit and platform to put pressure on Saudi Arabia to get this done, because like so many people have said, including the World Food Program and the U.N., that we're heading towards the biggest famine in modern history if we don't lift this blockade.
Yeah.
All right.
So, yeah, let's talk about that first.
The U.N. says 400,000 children could die this year.
Now, their official number, I think the last time the U.N. updated it, and this would have been, I think, a year and a half ago.
I know you're better on this than me, but their last number was 233.
So a quarter of a million dead back then.
Not all children.
But now they're saying those are very conservative estimates.
Absolutely right.
And old ones, too.
But now they're saying we could have 400,000 just children, never mind the adults, could die of famine this year.
In other words, we are moving severely up the chain of definitions of different degrees of famine.
And I'll go ahead and mention here that I interviewed Scott Paul from Oxfam just a week or two ago, and he said that those numbers sound absolutely right to him.
He's afraid it could be worse.
Yeah, it's it's really scary.
So what's been going on is Saudi Arabia, since January 3rd, has prevented fuel ships from entering the country.
And so there's been a blockade for six years, but there's a shift in the development in the type of things being restricted as of this year.
And and since that time, only, I think, one ship has been allowed in.
And we're talking hundreds of thousands of cubic metrics, tons of fuel.
I mean, this is no small thing.
And what's happening is fuel trucks are being stuck at Hodeidah port and unable to deliver critical fuel and food to the rest of the 80 percent of the Houthi governed territory.
So this is an extremely concerning situation.
The World Food Program has indeed said 400,000 kids could die in 2021 of severe, acute malnutrition, which means they only have weeks or months left.
And, you know, even though that number is huge, what we're not even talking about is all the unfortunate brain damage happening because of malnutrition.
That's permanent.
So, you know, even if people haven't died, they're living through hell right now.
And that's why we're calling for an end to the blockade on Yemen.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so let's go back to the beginning of the Biden government here.
They said all last year that, oh, we're going to end the war on Yemen.
That's the one thing we're going to do.
You can trust us on that at least.
And then they came into office and there was pressure immediately led by the likes of you in the Friends Committee and many others pushing that you better live up to your word.
And then they announced.
And I think as we discussed before, most of this narrative is actually correct, that they pulled back on American support.
We're not selling them any more bombs.
We're not providing the logistics, the maintenance, the logistics and the intelligence for the war anymore, supposedly.
At least that's what Kirby said.
And I think all indications were along those lines.
But then they're not necessarily doing anything to.
Well, I don't know.
What are they doing to get the Saudis to end this thing?
I know their ambassador or special envoy they sent over there, the way he talks, he seems to blame this all on the Houthis and and give the benefit of the doubt to the Saudis on everything.
And I wonder if they're sincere at all.
They don't mind the war continuing on as long as it's more deniable than before.
We're leading from further behind than we used to be.
Or what is going on here?
Yeah, that's the that's the billion dollar question right there.
Now, a group of 41 members, let's just put all the pieces together.
They have said they have said that they ended support for offensive operations in the Saudi UAE led coalition's war in Yemen and put a pause on weapon sales.
Now, we have we don't really have a lot of clarity.
And 41 members of Congress sent a letter to the Biden administration asking for answers on the definitions of offensive and defensive and a whole host of questions just to really get the clarity needed.
That report was due on March 25.
And here we are.
We're now well into April and we have no answers about what these things mean.
You know, I would be willing to bet we've stopped Intel sharing for airstrikes, but I don't know about spare parts transfers, you know, like the steady flow of spare parts that keep the warplanes in the air.
And that's a big part.
We don't talk about this, but that's a big part of the blockade in Yemen.
You know, Saudi warplanes threatening ships trying to dock at Hodeidah Harbor.
And, you know, so that's a big part of it.
So that to me says that we may still be complicit in offensive operations via the blockade on Yemen.
Yeah, which has always been the worst part of the war is the siege against civilian population there.
Exactly.
And what we're trying to do is we're trying to decouple these negotiations to say, well, yes, we want a ceasefire deal.
We want all the things, you know, to get better.
You know, we want to be neutral.
We want to have balanced diplomacy.
But the blockade needs to be separated from that.
That just needs to be lifted, as David Beasley from the World Food Program has said, needs to be lifted as a humanitarian act.
And Bruce Riedel has said it needs to be decoupled.
He's a Brookings analyst, CIA.
You know, he was advisor to several presidents.
And, you know, he's a really powerful voice on this subject, saying that the issues need to be decoupled.
Right.
In fact, he may be the most prominent, you know, real expert critic of this war, and he's often been a hawk on, you know, he recommended Obama tripling down in Afghanistan back in 09, for example.
He's not known for being on our side of these things.
But in this case, and there people can watch videos.
I saw a video conference of you and Bruce Riedel and some others where he's just absolutely disgusted by this.
Yeah, he's he's been an incredible ally on this subject.
And like he said, he's been unequivocally calling for the blockade in Yemen.
And and we have a lot of support and momentum on this right now.
And I really just encourage everybody to get involved.
This is a really urgent, desperate situation.
Folks can go to end the blockade dot com.
That's a that's a quick way folks can send an email to their members.
I was just going to say, you know, folks could send a quick thank you to Chairman Schiff, who signed that letter with Reps Dingell, Pocan and Khanna.
He should feel some love because he's calling out the blockade on Yemen as well.
You know, I don't know who is for this other than the Saudis.
Right.
Who in America says, yes, we should keep bombing and starving these people other than the missile manufacturers and the plan?
I mean, so some people, you know, there are people on all all sides of the map.
I think there's a real desire to appease the Saudis right now in the Biden administration, amongst among some.
I mean, and, you know, and they're walking.
Some are walking a fine line to try to, you know, you know, recalibrate, as they say, but not cut off the relationship or not blow it up.
And they're worried that, you know, calling on them to end the blockade and putting a lot of pressure on them and and, you know, even sanctioning MBS over the murder of Khashoggi.
I mean, they're worried that that's going to be a threat to national security.
And I would just respond that that the war in Yemen is a threat to our national security.
I really I just don't see how people can can make that calculation at this point.
And luckily, we have so much momentum going in the other way.
I really believe it's a matter of time before we win this thing, because it's just so many people are speaking out right now.
And that has to just grow and continue.
Yeah.
Hey, you know what?
It's so important, right, that we don't have any champions of this story on TV news anywhere, right?
There's not a cable news host.
I will say that CNN did that great report with Nima on the Saudi blockade.
So I will tip my hat to to CNN for getting that story out there.
Yeah, that's true.
In fact, it was cited in our letter.
Yeah.
In fact, they had really great coverage a year or so ago about UAE giving American equipment directly to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula there.
So but still, those are two kind of hard news stories.
It's still not the same as having Brooke Baldwin or, you know, whatever Sean Hannity or any one of these kind of personalities make a big deal about this.
And the point being that it's the grassroots pressure that's just come from regular people, mostly, I guess, reading alternative media to to really find out the narrative about what's going on here.
And somehow they've succeeded in making it.
You have succeeded in making it a huge, important issue anyway, despite what amounts to news black.
I mean, famously, MSNBC did not utter the word Yemen for three hundred and sixty five days in a row back a couple of years ago.
It's it's well, yes, there's an incredible coalition of grassroots activists led by Yemeni Americans like Jahan.
You know, Yemeni Alliance Committee is in San Francisco, and that's the the chair of that that amazing organization that has done so much work.
And yeah, it's just incredible the groundswell that we've seen.
But, you know, it is also the world's worst humanitarian crisis on the planet.
And there's something that the U.S. can do about it.
So it doesn't surprise me that so many people want to speak out.
Yeah, yeah, totally true.
But I just think, you know, despite the fact that there's essentially a black hole on TV news, where for the most part, the agenda is set.
And The New York Times, for example, they've years into the thing.
They finally sent somebody and had their former reporter, Nasser Araby, who they don't want to hear from anymore.
But they had him take their reporters, their photographers on a tour of the children's hospitals there.
And they wrote a piece about that.
But they have not made it a real issue.
If people have seen the documentary of manufacturing consent with Noam Chomsky, and they talk about how at the same time as the genocide was going on in Cambodia, there was also a massive, essentially a comparable slaughter going on in Indonesia.
And they show the comparison of the coverage, you know, and obviously Pol Pot got a lot more coverage than Harto did during all of that.
And and so you could see where the agenda set by the major media has not been that something needs to be done about this.
And yet the American people are insisting anyway.
So that's just what I think is a real achievement on the part of grassroots activists.
And by the way, everyone, it's Hassan El-Tayyab.
He is from the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
That's the anti-war Quaker lobby in Washington, D.C.
We're talking about the blockade of Yemen and the efforts against it.
So you were saying we have this new I guess it's a letter, a statement by 77 organizations.
There's a separate letter to Joe Biden that was signed.
Am I right?
Was it 76 Democrats?
And did any Republicans sign on to that, too?
No Republican signed on, unfortunately.
But let's keep trying.
OK.
Yeah.
And then there's also this thing with the celebrities here.
Advocates and celebrities call for an immediate end to the Saudi blockade.
You mentioned Mark Ruffalo there.
Can you mention some more?
And can you talk about what it is that they're doing?
And after all, this is airing in Los Angeles.
So there may be others who'd be willing to lend their name to this if they hear about it, you know?
Yes.
Thank you so much.
And yeah, on top of that, the Org Coalition we had led by folks like Mark Ruffalo.
We had the Phoenix family, Joaquin Liberty, Summer Rain, Orlando Bloom, Amy Schumer, Alyssa Milano, Sarah Silverman, you know, and a whole host of others.
Marianne Williamson signed the letter, as did some of our Yemeni colleagues like Aisha Juman, Shireen Al-Ademi, Jahan Hakim.
So and many others, too.
And I think if others would like to find our our letter or, you know, go to FCNL.org, it's really easy to find our Middle East program.
And and please retweet the letter and make your voice heard where.
Yeah, it's just that's what's really going to change.
This is if we if we engage so many people and and, you know, having the voice of Hollywood celebrities is a huge asset to this.
This this effort.
Right.
Yeah.
Just because it raises the visibility.
And then, as you say, what's going on there is so wrong.
And America is so responsible that, hey, we could do something about this.
We have to do something about this.
The worst humanitarian crisis in the world and our government is on the side of the people committing it and inflicting it.
Well, that ain't right.
Who could argue?
Who's going to sit here and tell me that the Houthi supposed relationship with Iran could justify this or any of the old talking points anymore?
When the U.N. says that you're going to we're on the brink of watching approximately half a million children die of starvation.
I mean, this tactic of collective punishment has really just created untold suffering for tens of millions of people and contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
And, you know, we really need the Biden administration.
You know, we need Lender King, the U.S. envoy to Yemen to speak out.
We need Blinken to speak out from Secretary of State Blinken.
Linda Thomas, Greenfield, Biden.
We really need them to be vocal right now.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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So here's what you do.
Go to LibertasBella.com and look at all the great Libertarian Institute stuff they've got going there.
Find the ad in the right hand margin at LibertarianInstitute.org.
LibertasBella.com.
All right.
Now, yes, go on about that.
Which are the most important congressmen and senators that you think stand on the hinges that could go either way and make a real difference here that people can focus on calling and writing to?
Well, I mean, I think everybody should call their own members of Congress and, you know, getting Senator Feinstein to do a letter against the blockade would be fantastic right now.
I think her voice is really needed.
And, you know, getting Chairman Schiff and Adam Schiff to do more.
I mean, I think, you know, he he could retweet the letter right now.
And I I think that would be wonderful if we get more and more people speaking out.
And we need more.
We don't have a letter in the Senate yet.
So we've got this great House letter, but, you know, pushing on the Senate side, too.
Another thing that we should do is encourage another War Powers resolution.
So I was just going to say, when is the next one of those coming up?
That I am pushing for that, man.
And we are trying to get, you know, letters are great.
And we've, you know, set this put this on the map.
But now Congress can reassert its Article one war powers and enforce the president because people forget that this, you know, supporting offensive operations, which definitely, you know, we need at the very least some clarity.
You know, we the the Congress does not even need to know if we're definitely doing that.
They you know, they can just say, hey, we don't have clarity, but we're going to end any U.S. support for the blockade.
Yeah.
So listen.
Yeah, about that, it's sort of just kind of beside the point when you're talking about starving civilians to death deliberately.
But this is illegal.
They don't have the slightest authorization for this whatsoever.
And then, as you're alluding to, but didn't quite explain, I'll give you a chance to the Congress has actually passed the war powers resolution, both houses twice in the Trump years.
And then.
Well, I forget, is that is that right?
They almost it was one and a half.
Yeah, they passed it through the Senate in 2018 and then and then passed it through the House and Senate and it got vetoed in 2019.
Right.
OK.
Yeah.
One and a half.
That should have been enough right there.
And that was a first in history, right, that the Congress passed the War Powers Act resolutions in order to try to restrict the president.
Exactly.
It was the first time in history.
It's huge.
Yeah.
And and unfortunately, you know, Trump vetoed it.
And we but we have a chance here, I think, to make some real progress.
But like I've been saying, you know, I think everybody needs to get involved.
And the blockade dot com is a great first step.
Yeah.
And and but so look, it's going to be harder to get the Democrats to go after Joe Biden on this, possibly right in the way as far as actually going as far as a war powers resolution commanding him that he must stop.
Is that going to be a harder hill for you to climb this time?
And when it's not Trump in the chair?
I mean, it's a good, good question.
I definitely think we're going to be up against a lot of opposition.
But we were up against a lot of opposition the first time we tried it.
And we did end up getting it through.
And there's another thing that people haven't really talked about.
But Speaker Pelosi has turned off the clock.
The expedited procedural status thing that gives, you know, ensures us a vote on, you know, because of covid-19.
So that's going to be another another fight to have is that, you know, even getting us to be able to force our vote, which is required by the Constitution, sorry, by the War Powers Act of 1973.
It requires that expedited procedural status.
So there's going to be a lot of opposition.
But I think we should we got to try.
We got to push our members to do it.
And I think we can get it done.
Yeah.
Look, I mean, obviously the show is anti-war radio.
This is the most important thing.
I know that this is what you think is the most important thing.
But this is what everybody should think is the most important thing.
There are 100 million political issues we can all fight about all day long.
But hey, let's call off the genocide.
And then we'll fight all day about what to do about.
I mean, I don't want to downplay any of these other things.
They're they're all huge.
But man, this is the worst thing going on in the whole world right now.
Yeah, it is.
And I I really am I'm shocked sometimes that not as many people are speaking out.
But I think this is our moment.
I really do.
And we got to we got to get it done, because like you said, there are so many people we've been talking about on the brink of famine.
Well, Yemen is in famine now.
Yeah, it's been like this for years.
The worst cholera outbreaks in history, and that includes when Bush senior and Bill Clinton deliberately inflicted this kind of situation on the people of Iraq after Iraq war one.
And human beings should never be used as bargaining chips.
And the Yemeni civilians should not be held hostages to, you know, lengthy and rocky negotiations between unstable warring parties.
I mean, that's just not OK.
Yeah.
And by the way, do you know the chapter and verse on the Geneva conventions and the American federal laws?
I know that there is a war crimes act in the United States that says it's a federal felony to commit war crimes.
And of course, we have signed all of these treaties.
And America has been the architect of the treaties that ban these things for 100 years.
Yeah.
And the U.N. just said last year that the that the U.S., U.K., France and others who have been supporting the Saudi led coalition may be complicit in war crimes.
And I think if with very little investigation, you could probably, you know, see a straight line to U.S. taxpayer dollars going to support war crimes in Yemen.
Yeah.
Well, The New York Times reported that in the Obama years and in the Trump years, lawyers in the State Department wrote up memos to the boss saying, I'm concerned we could all go to prison.
And then those memos were put in drawers and not acted upon, but apparently still exist.
And that's if you can believe a word The New York Times claims these days.
But it seemed against interest in a way, scandalous in favor of our point of view that, you know, they're not the champions of.
So I don't know.
Yeah, but that sounds right.
It sounds right.
And Yemen needs a lot.
You know, we need accountability, but like we're that's we need to prevent the famine.
We need to prevent and we need to do that now.
I think we need a new U.N. Security Council resolution to replace the old template for diplomacy, which basically said that the Houthis need to give up their weapons and surrender immediately.
I mean, that's not happening.
They basically won the war.
You know, they govern 80 percent of the territories.
That template needs to be rejected.
We also need reconstruction and reparations for Yemen.
I mean, and the the warring the people that supported the warring parties like the US, UK, France, Canada, Saudi Arabia, UAE and others need to pay their, you know, pay their fair share and help Yemen get back on its feet.
Yeah.
And can you tell me about the activism going on in Europe right now and what the people there are doing?
And are they having any success in pressuring their governments to say or do anything?
I know the British are number two behind America in terms of supplying their typhoon jets and BAE systems, brand bombs.
Well, I mean, there's a lot of activism going all over the place.
You know, earlier this year, there was an almost a 400 or coalition international coalition, you know, from countries like the UK, France, Canada, Germany, all over the world in the US, obviously.
And yeah, it was an incredible show of solidarity across borders.
And I think we need more of that for sure.
I will say that the momentum we have here in the US, I mean, we are the main supporter.
And and this this is what we need to do is get the US to be vocal.
And I think others will follow.
But, you know, like back in 2013, the House of Commons voted down bombing Syria, and that really helped undermine the move for war in the United States at the same time, too.
I wonder if any of those same members of the House of Commons are still there.
They've all been purged since then.
I mean, unfortunately, I am not sure about that.
But unfortunately, the UK did just approve new weapon sales to Saudi.
And I believe Canada did as well.
And so we've got a major problem there.
But that's why we need a new UN Security Council resolution to basically make it illegal to sell weapons to the warring parties like the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
So that's why I think it's so important to get some UN Security Council action.
Hey, let me ask you this.
Are you do you have any communication with of any kind with the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, or do you know of reporters that you could maybe help plant a question with him or anything like that?
I mean, we're trying.
Actually, it's funny you mentioned that we are trying and we you know, we're definitely pushing and we definitely shared the the letter that Ro Khanna and Defazio led and are trying to get those questions answered.
And they intercepted a good story on that if people want to look it up.
And I bring that up.
I alluded this before, but I'll go ahead and tell you.
Anybody can Google this up easily.
January 2015 in The Wall Street Journal and in another one in our monitor by Barbara Slavin.
There are great write ups of how Lloyd Austin, who was then the head of Central Command, was working with the new Houthi government after regime, whatever you want to call them, after they had overthrown the old state at the end of 2014.
And Central Command said, hey, you guys like killing Al Qaeda?
Fine, let's be friends.
And the Houthis said, OK.
And they were beginning to work together.
And that was just, you know, two months later.
That was just two months before Barack Obama ordered Austin to start bombing them instead or helping the Saudis bomb them, technicality in brackets here.
But so that's the reason I bring that up is not for like, hey, let's appeal to the secretary of defense's morality, Renee.
But how about his sense of strategy?
Why are we fighting on the side of Al Qaeda in our illegal war of genocide?
Yeah, maybe we could rethink this starting right now.
I think the driver of a lot of this policy is probably coming from the National Security Council.
And, you know, I mean, Sullivan, maybe, you know, there's a guy, Brett McGurk.
He's the director of the Middle East portfolio.
So I think, you know, that Lender King's office, you know, they have it.
So it's hard to know exactly where, but that would be my guess.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's wrap up here real quick.
Tell us about the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
That's FCNL.org and EndTheBlockade.com.
And how else can people participate in this great effort?
Well, yeah, I thank you so much for giving me a platform here to talk about this really important, urgent issue.
People should go to EndTheBlockade.com.
Send a quick note to your member of Congress and make sure that they're speaking out publicly against the blockade.
I think folks should go to FCNL.org, poke around the Middle East page.
You can read the letter that we've put together and also share that in social media and, you know, sign up for our email list and stay in touch.
Great.
OK, you guys, that is Hassan El-Tayyab from the Great Friends Committee on National Legislation.
Thank you again so much, Hassan.
Thanks.
All right, you guys, and that is Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Again, I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director at Antiwar.com.
An author of the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, 5,500 of them now, going back to 2003, at ScottHorton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
