For Pacifica Radio, July 25th, 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 editorial director of antiwar.com.
And I'm the author of the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,500 of them now, going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
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All right, introducing this great guest, Mark Curtis, who I've wanted to talk to for so long and finally am getting around to.
He's got this extremely important article at Declassified UK, where he is the editor.
And the piece is called Revealed UK Troops Secretly Operating in Yemen.
And but also let me tell you, he is the author of The Great Deception, Anglo-American Power and World Order, Web of Deceit, Britain's real role in the world.
And his latest from 2018 is Secret Affairs, Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam.
Welcome to the show, Mark.
How are you doing, sir?
Hi, Scott.
Very good to be here.
Very well, thanks.
Great.
Very happy to have you on the show.
And, you know, I have secret affairs on the pile here and I haven't read it yet.
But now I'm more intrigued than ever to get to that thing.
And I'll bet I'll find a bunch of stuff in there that I wish I had already known and put in my book.
But anyway, this is so important.
This war should have been over.
The president of the United States said he was ending it back at the beginning of February, just a couple of weeks into power here.
And you would think if that was true, then the British would have followed his lead on that.
And yet the war keeps going.
Six and a quarter years in or so, the American and we always leave out the UK, but the U.S., UK, Saudi, UAE, al-Qaeda war against the Houthi regime in Sana'a, Yemen.
Right.
It's still going on.
Yeah, I think the reality is that the U.S. and the UK are so in bed with the Saudis, you know, the relationship is so close.
They're so invested in supporting this brutal dictatorship in Riyadh that they'll do anything to to support their their foreign policy.
And as we've seen, you know, even over the last six years with this the worst humanitarian catastrophe that there is in the world over the last few years, you know, the arms exports, the training, the intelligence cooperation between Washington, London and Riyadh has there's been no let up in that.
You know, it's been it's been relentless.
Plus plus the apologies, you know, the apologies for the Saudi war crimes in Yemen.
Thousands of airstrikes on hospitals and schools over the last few years by U.S. and UK trained pilots armed with our missiles.
You know, this is this is the the worst conflict in the world.
And both the U.S. administration and British governments have completely escaped international censure for it.
And, you know, I've watched with dismay mainstream media reporting on both sides of the Atlantic that's basically let both governments off the hook for their role in this war.
OK, so now UK troops in my book I talked about, I think there was one really great piece in The Guardian about this and just one, I'm pretty sure, about the British special boat services down in Yemen training Saudi troops and including even child soldiers there.
And now you have further confirmation of British special forces training Saudi troops and who else?
And and does your information include training child soldiers as well?
Well, no, our information doesn't include training child soldiers.
What what we've done in Declassified is shown, I think, for the for the first time that there is the this secret deployment of British troops at this airport in eastern Yemen.
It's Al Haida Airport.
And, you know, what we know is that there are up to 30 British troops there.
They're providing training to the Saudi military.
They're providing logistical support to the Saudi military who who actually control that airport and they control what goes in and out of that that airport.
It's actually located very close to Oman, which is, to all intents and purposes, pretty much a British colony in the Gulf that has British intelligence bases, has a couple of hundred British troops advising the sultan.
So it's very possible that those troops have come out of the Gulf and have come to the Gulf and have come over from Oman or linked potentially to the British deployment in Oman.
We don't actually know that.
But what's particularly concerning, controversial, I guess, about this deployment of troops at the airport is that a few months ago, Human Rights Watch revealed that there was torture going on at this Saudi controlled airport where dissidents in Yemen had been interrogated by the Saudi authorities, only to emerge a little bit later, having borne the scars of torture.
And we've been told that this British contingent is based at that same airport near where that Saudi prison is.
So who knows, actually, what's going on there?
I mean, we haven't been able to establish details so far.
This is an area that does need further investigation.
What's happened is that over the last few years, there's been a couple of reports about British special forces operating in Yemen.
Like you mentioned, the Special Boat Service, which is the Navy's special forces in the UK, they were reported to be operating there.
But it's only been reported a couple of times.
So it's a very sensitive operation.
And one particular reason why it's particularly sensitive for the British is that over the last few years, they have been pretending, the government, that they're not a party to this conflict in Yemen.
They've been saying that it's a war of the Saudi coalition, of which they are not a member.
It's completely nonsense.
It's complete nonsense, because the UK has been doing everything to support the Saudis, including having this direct role in the country.
I think the reason why the British are very sensitive about admitting that there's troops in Yemen is because they don't want to admit that they're party to illegal operations and party to the war crimes that have been practiced by the Saudi military over the last few years in Yemen, particularly the airstrikes, which have targeted civilians, schools and hospitals and so on.
The British and the Americans don't want to be seen to be part of that war.
The reality, of course, is that Yemen is a part British and part US war.
And the role of Washington and London in Saudi military operations is so great that they have to be considered to be a part of the conflict.
So we've been trying to piece together, well, what is this secret British role in Yemen?
We've asked the Ministry of Defense and they haven't told us.
Surprise, surprise.
But we have it on good authority from local journalists, local tribal leaders.
And in fact, in that part of Yemen, it's a little bit of an open secret that there is this British deployment at that airport.
And you talk about in the article that there are Americans there as well.
Now, do you know this is the military or this is CIA?
And I guess, do you know about MI6 or it's all just special operations guys?
Um, we don't have details.
I think we can presume they are CIA trainers of the Saudi military, because that seems to be what's going on there.
We know that they're British troops, troops in the sense of people in military uniforms, but not necessarily taking part in combat operations.
I'd actually be very surprised if any US or UK troops are actually taking place in military operations.
I think they are training Saudi forces to do that.
And they're doing everything short of actually participating in military activities with them.
Right.
I mean, that would be the guess.
Yeah.
There are Americans there.
It's probably Rangers training.
Okay.
Have there been any reports in the past of British special operations forces actually participating in the fighting on the ground?
Because I thought I'd read that back a couple of years ago.
Yeah, there have been.
This special boat service detachment of the Navy special forces was reported to be taking part in operations with the Saudis.
So obviously, that's a bit of a fine line that's been crossed in terms of actual participation in military activities on the ground.
That's not the information we're receiving from our latest report.
My understanding is that this force at the airport in eastern Yemen is a military training program, training the Saudis to take part in military operations.
But as I say, the details of it are very, very obscure.
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One of the things you guys were told was that people are not just being held in this prison there and even tortured, but being renditioned to Saudi Arabia also?
Yes.
I mean, that again, it's hard to pin down.
That is what we've been told.
And in fact, Human Rights Watch produced this report recently that had a lot more details on what is alleged to be going on at that prison facility in that airport that does seem to include torture and rendition, the sort of usual panoply of Anglo-American operations at these black sites, which I guess we can consider this to be a bit of a black site that's just sort of emerged more recently than the ones that we know about over the last years in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on.
So it clearly is a difficult one to pin down, but it will be useful to see more US journalists inquiring into what's going on there and actually to ask more questions of the US administration in terms of what their presence is at that airport in eastern Yemen.
All right.
Now, so I want to get back more specifically to the British role and all of that in a minute, but I want to give you more of a chance to talk about the humanitarian crisis there.
You've referred to it a few times, but I think our government is up to its eyeballs in this and Raytheon and Lockheed and all of those guys too, even the New York Times showed how Raytheon had lobbied hard during the Trump years to keep the war going when Congress was trying to stop it.
But so this really matters.
This isn't just some ugly conflict somewhere in the world.
This is the United States of America and our allies, the British, are really helping to do this to these people.
But what is this?
What does the war look like to the people of Yemen, Mark?
Yeah, well, first of all, I mean, you're absolutely right to say that this is an American and British war.
The extent of Washington and London's involvement with the Saudis, particularly in the air campaigns, the bombing campaigns of Yemen over the last six years, has been absolutely enormous.
There can be no doubt that the Saudis would not have been able to have conduct the mass bombing of Yemen that they've carried out over the last six years without the support of Washington and London.
I mean, the aircraft are actually maintained by BAE Systems and the Royal Air Force, BAE Systems being the sort of largest British arms corporation that has a huge project in Saudi Arabia to maintain the Typhoon and Tornado warplanes that operate from the Saudi Air Force bases.
That's where they take off from to attack Yemen.
Every week, there's a cargo flight of spare parts flown out from the north of England to a Saudi military base that help to maintain those Saudi warplanes.
You know, the pilots are being trained by the British.
We're supplying not only the arms and the missiles, but we're storing the bombs and issuing the bombs for those individual aircraft.
We are advising their targeting operations, you know, the Saudi Air Force.
So we're doing everything short of actually pulling the trigger.
And I mean, the impact that this has had on Yemen is utterly just devastating.
I mean, it's hard to really capture it.
But 16 million people are food insecure in the language of the UN.
I mean, that's sort of starving to anyone else.
There has been widespread starvation in Yemen for the last four or five years, millions of people constantly on the brink of famine.
And, you know, this famine has been enforced by specific Saudi policy of blockading the ports and the air routes into Yemen.
So humanitarian aid can get into Yemen, but it can only get in via a couple of ports where all the fuel and food that comes in is checked on the ground, supposedly to ensure that there's no arms on board that's going to reach the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
But this blockade has meant that the people of Yemen have obviously faced massive food restrictions.
And at the same time, they've been bombed to bits.
I mean, the official figures from Yemen Data, an organization which has provided the most credible figures on number of airstrikes and number of civilians killed over the last few years, the official figures from them are that there's been 22,766 air raids over the last six years involving 62, sorry, 65,982 individual airstrikes.
Right, that's 65,000 airstrikes on Yemen, which was actually already the poorest country in the Middle East.
And a third of those 65,000 airstrikes, according to Yemen Data, have hit non-military targets like schools, hospitals, agricultural gardens, marketplaces, that sort of thing, non-military targets, a third of them, that's over 20,000 airstrikes.
And just to add a couple of figures from them, I mean, around 9,000 people have been killed in these aerial attacks, but just as widespread an impact from those attacks has been what that's done to Yemen's economy and the ability to feed and house the poorest population in the Middle East.
And all this has been done with the overt support of the US and the UK.
And of course, it has been largely kept out of the media.
That's the thing.
I mean, what we've seen in this country is that people probably know far more about the atrocities perpetrated by the Syrian government, you know, an official enemy of the US and the UK, because the media have been prepared to cover those atrocities, because the governments kind of want them to cover those atrocities.
But when it comes to the Yemen war, which is our war, the culpability of the US and the UK has largely been kept out of the press.
There have been some reports, there have been sporadic reports about the UK role, but really not consistent.
And, you know, we have declassified, have probably revealed more about the British role in the Yemen war over the last six years than the rest of the British media put together.
That's simply because we want to do that.
We think it's important to reveal what that British role is.
And the rest of the media seems to be completely uninterested in that.
So yeah, this is a devastating conflict for which, you know, the US and the UK do bear very considerable responsibility.
And there may be some exceptions to this, but I think it's fair to say, you can tell me whether you agree with this or not, that even in all of the devastation of the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq War II and Iraq War III, the war in Syria, well, the war in Syria is a dirty war kind of thing, but like the air war in Yemen.
I mean, overall, we've had a couple million people die, probably, you know, somewhere around 2 million people probably killed in this thing.
But at the same time, I don't think the US or the UK's air force has ever really deliberately targeted civilians in, you know, something comparable to terror bombings, like in World War II, where they're deliberately targeting the civilian population to destroy them.
Would you agree with me that this is, there's a distinction there in the way that this war is deliberately being waged against the civilian population like this?
Yeah, I mean, for a start, I definitely think that is true.
And I mean, comparing it to other conflicts is difficult in, you know, in the sense that the figures vary from conflict to conflict.
There's different ways to interpret data often.
But what we know is if there really are 20,000 airstrikes against civilian targets in Yemen, which is what all the credible information points to, it's hard to believe that that is not a deliberate campaign of targeting civilians.
And the reason I say it's hard to believe is that, you know, both the Saudis and the US UK say that, well, the airstrikes are not deliberately targeting these civilians.
You know, they're targeting military targets or they say that, well, they're targeting Houthi forces who happen to be in schools or based in hospitals.
Thing is, this is what military aggressors always say.
It's what the Israelis say in the West Bank.
It's what the Syrians say in Syria.
I mean, this happens throughout history.
Oh, we're not deliberately targeting civilians.
They just end up being at the end of our bombs.
It's hard to believe it's anything other than a calculated attack on the civilian population, which of course is a case of simple terrorism.
And I think that's probably a way of probably best understanding it.
You know, it certainly is as bad as any other conflict going on in the world at the moment.
As I say, the only other probably comparable conflict is really in Syria, where I think the Syrian regime, not that I'm a supporter at all of the opponents of the Syrian regime, but the Syrian regime has been targeting civilian infrastructure as well.
Again, using the same arguments that, you know, military forces are based in those buildings and therefore they don't have any alternative but to target those.
But I think that this sort of, you know, this mass aerial bombing that the Saudis have been carried out with the support of the US and the UK is, you know, it's a form of terrorism.
Let me ask you this.
I referred a couple of times there to Joe Biden's statement as, you know, just a few weeks after he was sworn in, that he's dialing all this back.
He'll help them shoot down drones and incoming missiles into Saudi Arabia, but he's not gonna help prosecute the war against Yemen anymore.
And now here we are months later, as I said, Admiral Kirby already walked some of that back.
Well, of course, we have to maintain their F-15s or else they won't be able to fly their F-15s.
And just the same as BAE Systems, as you said, is still servicing their Typhoons, but so do you have any indication that they scaled back any of this?
Yeah, I mean, obviously Biden's decision to freeze arms exports is significant, but the rest of the programs of support are ongoing as far as I am aware.
And you mentioned them, you know, intelligence, logistics, maintenance.
So it's really a public relations stance by the US administration.
For the last three years, the British, three or four years, maybe even five years, the British and the Americans have known that this war is not really winnable.
That the Saudis can keep bombing the poorest country in the Middle East into the dust, but the Houthis will come back even stronger.
And they've been searching for a way out.
But trying to find a way out without totally losing face.
I actually think that probably the US needs to be seen to be putting a bit of pressure on Saudi Arabia to prosecute or to take more seriously a peace process and to actually pressure them to end this war without completely losing the face of the Saudis who have invested a lot in this conflict.
And for them to pull out now and say, well, we lost, would be a huge blow because the Saudis for decades have regarded Arabia as their fiefdom.
And in that they've been completely supported by Washington and London.
So they need to come out of this war looking like they haven't completely lost.
And I think that this sort of cut off in arms exports but continuing to support the Saudis behind the scenes is probably part of that process of trying to bring about an end to the war.
The British though have taken a different stance.
I mean, they haven't even done that.
I mean, there's been no signs that they've been pulling back from completely supporting the Saudis.
Although I think they are putting pressure on the Saudis to try and bring about a ceasefire and an end to the war.
Again, for the same reason that the British are worried about the Saudis losing face by losing the war.
But basically this intelligence support, the logistic support, the maintenance support, I mean, all of that, if the US were serious about completely stopping this war tomorrow out of humanitarian reasons, then they could certainly cut off all of that support.
And there's absolutely no sign that the Biden administration and certainly not the UK are interested in doing that.
I think we have to probably have to look at this in a bit of a global context as well.
I mean, the US and Britain have utterly failed in Afghanistan and they're sort of pulling back most of their forces from Afghanistan.
They clearly had utterly failed in Iraq on their own terms.
And look at the disaster of Iraq.
You take another war in Libya, the 2011 war in Libya, which was another disaster for the country.
And it has also hardly benefited the Americans and the British who were well behind that war.
So that's another failure.
And then in Syria, the Syrians with their Russian backers are in a dominant position.
So to fail in Yemen after those other four failures would be a really huge blow to Anglo-American prestige, I think.
And that's one of the things that they are very worried about.
They can't afford to have another glaring loss because it just looks really bad given how much they've invested in that war and in the special relationship that they have with the Saudis.
Yep.
Same could be said for the war across the waterway there in Somalia, where they say the war is against al-Shabaab, but al-Shabaab is the result of the war.
We only started fighting al-Shabaab in 2007, but the war's been going on since 2001.
So the excuse is actually the effect.
And same thing.
They can't admit they lost when, I don't know, it seems just as likely in Somalia as in Yemen that without the war, if the people of those countries were allowed to settle things themselves, that maybe that would be to the detriment of al-Shabaab's and Houthi's authority.
You know what I mean?
We don't know that.
As they say, war is the health of the state.
I know a Yemeni journalist named Nasser Araby who said something to the effect of, hey, we're all Houthis now.
I mean, this is like having the Texans in charge in Washington, D.C.
It doesn't mean it's not America.
It's just, you know, they're the ones in power now, but we're being attacked by a foreign enemy.
So, of course, we're, you know, on the side of our government that's defending us from them, you know?
How would we expect it to be any other way?
Yeah, I mean, I think we're dealing here, aren't we, with rapacious war machines, you know, with the giant U.S. military budget, with, you know, in Britain, we have a smaller military budget, but still a big one compared to the size of the economy.
And, you know, we've got these two new aircraft carriers which are now going around the world displaying Britain's military might.
We've got this new investment in the British military.
Britain, over the last 400 years, has been the world's most warmongering nation, probably, when you look at it.
And, you know, these two countries think they have the right to rule the world by force.
They literally do.
It's deeply ingrained in the decision-making processes in Washington and in London.
And they use their military power in order to exert the elites' interests wherever they think that they can achieve what they want to achieve.
Usually, it's natural resources interests or geopolitical or shaping the world in, you know, according to their interests.
They've been doing this for a very long time.
They, and the impacts of these interventions, even when they rebound, and even when there's massive blowback, as clearly we've seen in the case of Iraq, which produced ISIS, Islamic State, in the case of Libya, which produced massive terrorism.
In the case of the disastrous Anglo-American secret interventions in Syria, which have fueled the jihadists in Syria.
Even in the cases where terrorism is fueled, which we are meant to be at war with, we still have more and more military interventions.
And in fact, you know, over the last few months, the British government has produced this new military strategy, which explicitly says that there will be more war fighting.
You know, there will be a greater focus on special forces deployed overseas to be constantly campaigning in the words of this new military strategy, constantly campaigning and geared up for more war fighting.
So, you know, even though they're failing on their own terms, but still the machine is an ever turning one, promoting war after war after war.
They can rely on the media to give them favorable reports.
And it really is, you know, it's up to us.
It's up to us citizens, journalists, academics, ordinary people to, you know, to challenge what our elites are doing because there's no inbuilt mechanism for them to change at all, even when they fail on their own terms.
It's a worrying cycle of violence that we are faced with in our countries.
Yeah.
All right, you guys, that is Mark Curtis.
Check him out at Declassified UK.
This important story revealed UK troops secretly operating in Yemen and his books are Secret Affairs, Web of Deceit and The Great Deception.
Thanks so much for coming on the show, Mark.
Thank you very much for having me.
All right, you guys, and that's been Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
Find the full interview archive, more than 5,500 of them now, at scotthorton.org and sign up for the podcast feed there, of course.
And it's all also at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
You can follow me on Twitter, at scotthortonshow.
And I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
