10/17/16 – Jonathan Landay – The Scott Horton Show

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On the line, I got Jonathan Landay, and here he is again writing with Warren Strobel like the old days.
Now both of them at Reuters, and a very important piece here, exclusive.
As Saudis bombed Yemen, it shouldn't be past tense, but anyway, U.S. worried about legal blowback.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jonathan?
I'm doing well.
Thanks very much, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So State Department officials worried about the legalities of helping Saudi bomb Yemen for the last 20 months, huh?
Yes, they did.
Go ahead.
Well, we understand that there were queries from very senior lawyers at the State Department, no names, wondering whether or not the fact that the United States was not only selling munitions more than a billion dollars worth specifically to replace bombs dropped in Yemen, but also the fact that the United States is providing intelligence and has been refueling Saudi aircraft since the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen against the Houthi rebels began last March.
And our understanding is that the question was whether or not the United States could become or could be seen under international law as a co-belligerent.
Had that happened, I mean, if there was such a finding, that would oblige the United States to basically investigate itself as well as war crimes in Yemen.
And it raised a legal risk that perhaps U.S. military personnel could be subject to international prosecution.
I mean, that's the theory.
Whether or not it would happen, we don't know.
At least this question was raised at very, very senior levels within the State Department.
And what we were told was by both current and former officials is that no conclusion was ever reached on this question, even though the United States proceeded with the support it has been giving to the Saudis.
No conclusion was ever reached.
What exactly does that mean, Jonathan, that somebody said, hey, stop trying to conclude a thing and they just stopped instead of finishing the job?
Well, we don't know.
We do know that there were some fairly senior, there were conversations and deliberations at very senior levels.
Why no conclusion was ever reached, we were not able to ascertain.
But we did ascertain, in fact, that no conclusion to that very important question was ever reached.
OK, now, so when you're saying high level officials, this is all confined to the State Department or they must have been talking with the National Security Council and at least the deputies at the other departments, right?
No.
Well, we do know that there was at least, I believe, one meeting at the National Security Council that at which that's the White House, right?
Yes.
It was this question was considered.
We also know that there were fairly senior, there were meetings at very senior levels all the way up to including a deputy secretary of the deputy secretary of state, Tony Blinken, on this issue in January.
But what but we're also, you know, but it's and it's our understanding that in these internal policy discussions, they also included Pentagon officials.
And our understanding is that the Pentagon and the State Department's Near East Affairs Bureau leant very heavily towards preserving close ties with the Saudis because this was all happening at the time of the Iran nuclear deal.
Whereas on the other side, we're under our understanding was that the State Department's Office of Legal Advisor, you know, which is the top State Department legal office by and other officials within the State Department were the ones who are expressing concern over possible U.S. complicity in possible Saudi violations of the laws of war.
OK.
In other words, the the Northeast Affairs Bureau, their worry, their their job is worrying about the politics.
The Near East.
Near East Affairs.
I think you said something about Northeast.
Oh, yeah.
I'm an idiot.
No, I just it's because it's because I wrote N.E. on my notes as well.
I'm sorry.
Yes.
The Near East Affairs Bureau, they they're worried about the politics of the region and they're doing this Iran deal.
And as they told The New York Times unashamedly, unabashedly that, well, you know, we needed to placate the Saudis.
And so that's why we wanted to go ahead and let them have the war.
On the other hand, the people in the legal office, they were worried and they were the ones.
And I guess as far as you can tell, they just lost out the debate on whether to continue investigating this question to its conclusion.
Is that it?
Well, we don't know if they ever lost out.
We just we just know that there was never, ever an official decision as to that question.
What is the United States complicit in possible Saudi violations of the international laws on conflict?
And yeah, I mean, essentially what we were told was what The New York Times was told, that the Near East Affairs Bureau, you know, lent very heavily towards support, gave the onus of their argument, put the onus of their argument on maintaining good relations with Saudi at a time when the United States needed and wanted Saudi, the Saudis to sign on to the Iran nuclear deal.
Now so here's the thing.
As far as the you bring up Charles Taylor and the legalities, the international, the law, the international law about war crimes and how it applies to these three major accounts, the arms sales in the middle of a war, the intel and the refueling.
So we talk about all that.
But I wonder about whether anybody brought up the fact that everybody knows and everybody has known all along that this war cannot possibly succeed when the avowed mission is to reinstall Hadi on the throne in Sana'a and that that is impossible.
And yet they continue to wage the war with that as the stated goal.
They might as well say they're going to make, you know, Abe from Japan the next president of Yemen as possible as it is to put Hadi in there now.
Well they only make half that argument, Scott, that half being there's no military solution to the civil war in Yemen and that there has to be a political settlement.
I think when they say that, what they do mean is that Hadi has to be restored to the presidency in Sana'a.
And as you say, that doesn't look very like a very practical goal, given the fact that the Houthis who control Sana'a, as well as the former president Saleh, don't look like they're in any mood to accept a political agreement that brings Hadi back from Saudi Arabia.
Now I have to point out that this story was based on documents and emails that we obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
And you referred to the Charles Taylor part of this.
That we got clued into was not something I cooked up.
One of the emails that we got a hold of through this FOIA had most of the virtually the entire email was redacted.
But in the subject line was a reference to the Charles Taylor decision by the International Criminal Court.
It didn't say that.
I took what was in the subject line and I googled it and came up with the brief that the United States government itself had submitted to the military commissions trying the 9-11 conspirators, KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants, in which the United States appears to have endorsed this broader, what came out of the Charles Taylor trial, which was a broader definition under international law of aiding and abetting war crimes.
And that the fact that they brought this brief up that had been sent down to the military commission in Guantanamo appears to substantiate that the fact that the United States endorsed this new finding, this broader finding of aiding and abetting, and that this was a concern to lawyers who were looking at the question of whether or not there's possible U.S. complicity in what the Saudis have been doing in terms of bombing civilian infrastructure, schools, markets.
We now have this horrendous bombing of the wedding hall, sorry, of the hall where there was a wake going on last week or the week before.
No, last week.
I'm sorry.
And so, yeah, that's how the Charles Taylor thing came into this.
Right.
And, you know, we should mention, too, and I guess this is in your documents and in the rest of your reporting, but, you know, the audience should know that as far as whether or not the arms sales are going on, whether or not there are Americans helping pick targets and provide intelligence for this war, whether or not the American planes are refueling the Saudi planes on their missions is not in questions.
Widely reported by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Reuters, The National News Hour, whatever.
This is not denied by our government.
It's sort of unofficial.
It's what is it, clandestine, not covert, something like that?
No, not at all.
It's official.
And in fact, you know, there were Americans in the Saudi joint operations center.
But I believe that there was an announcement several weeks ago that most of them have been withdrawn.
And, you know, the United States now finds itself in a very, very peculiar position in that it is supporting Saudi.
And yet you had this horrendous bombing of this funeral ceremony that killed over 100 people and that the Saudis, in fact, have acknowledged was what, at least in their version, was a mistake.
That has put the United States in a really delicate position because it has found itself being tied to the Saudi bombing of civilian infrastructure.
So what do you do?
It appears that the United States has been has been increasingly critical of the Saudi bombing campaign and yet continues to support it as far as we can tell.
And, you know, I think there were kind of conflicting reports back and forth about whether they were withdrawing their intelligence guys in Saudi.
And, you know, they said they were doing that.
Then they said they were doing it again.
And it was like, wait, I thought you guys did that a week ago.
Something like that.
So I think I think here's what I think the United States has is kind of restricting its support to now.
And that is what they claim to be.
You know, the United States supports what they call the territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia.
So it seems like the the most of the American support is is providing intelligence and logistical support to the Saudis to target Houthi incursions across the border from Yemen into Saudi Arabia.
And I'm pretty sure that that's now as much as what the United States is doing in terms of support.
Well, of course, there's all contractors and cutouts and everything.
That's something else that could be one of these charges, too, right, is it's got to be American government policy to have all the contractors over there taking care of all the care and feeding of the airplanes that we sell them, because that's dirty work that Saudi princes don't do.
Well, I mean, that that is I don't know.
That's not just the free market, right?
That's there's a State Department license for that kind of behavior.
That's right.
I mean, well, well, you know, when you sell when the United States or any country, Russia, Britain sells, you know, billions of dollars worth of airplanes or whatever to another country, a lot of times part of that contract is the maintenance contract as well as the maintenance.
So the people who make the airplanes are people who know how to maintain them are brought over as contractors to do just that.
Hey, I wonder if you've ever heard this or at least if you keep your ear out for this.
I heard it first from former Ambassador Dan Simpson, and it was unconfirmed by him.
It was just something he had heard.
He wasn't reporting it, but he had heard it.
And Andrew Coburn has heard it as well, that there have even been white boys flying in the back seats of those F-15s.
Americans, if not current Air Force, former Air Force pilots now as contractors flying in the back seat, holding these Saudis hands all the way to their funerals that they're bombing.
I don't know that at all.
And I had not heard that.
But, you know, the United States policy, at least, and we discussed this very much in the story, was that they continued with the arms sales and all of the other support.
But at the same time, they seemed to think that it was responsible.
A responsible action was to try and.
Help the Saudis mitigate or reduce civilian casualties so that they they are that the idea is we sell them, the United States sells them so-called precision guided munitions, the GPS satellite guided munitions, because those are far more accurate than so-called dumb bombs, and therefore you'll reduce civilian casualties.
The other part of that equation was the fact that the administration sent to Saudi Arabia a expert on civilian casualty mitigation.
But I don't believe that that person is there anymore.
I think that he was withdrawn.
Him in a crate of cluster bombs.
Right.
Amazing.
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All right.
So tell me about the naval blockade, because, you know, I don't know if you saw Adam Johnson's write up at FAIR about the general TV and newspaper coverage of the supposed shrug missile attack, the first and or second one there on the American ship in the Red Sea.
But it's they all are reporting it as though all of history began yesterday and nobody has ever heard anything about an American-Saudi war against these people.
It's not Saleh and his former government and army.
It's just these Houthi rebels, even though they've been the government of the capital city for, you know, going on two years now.
But it's just they're completely full of it.
They refuse to tell any bit of the story except scary brown people attacked our peaceful warship that was minding its own business somewhere.
Well, you know, there does seem to be some question now, I believe, about whether or not missiles were actually fired at the USS Mason.
But the fact is, Scott, that the ship, if we are to believe the U.S. government version, was in international waters when it was fired on.
And this was not the first time that not just an American warship, but that other warships have been fired on.
I believe the UAE had one that was actually hit.
And so the firing of the repost by the United States, you know, the the firing the missiles back at these radar sites in Yemen under international law, if we are to believe the United States version that these ships are in international waters, is permissible.
Yeah, but wait a minute.
What if they're enforcing a blockade from international waters?
Well, I don't.
Then that that is something else.
And I've not seen anything along those lines that these ships were enforcing the kind of blockade that the Saudis have been forcing, where they've actually stop vessels and search them because claiming that they need to determine to make sure that they're not carrying weapons supplies to the Houthis.
I don't think the Americans are involved in that particular blockade.
Sure, it's easy to see why that's a pretty gray area from the Yemenis point of view when we're the ones are our warships are sailing with the Saudis and the UAE enforcing this and we're flying with them all.
It's all one big American war to them.
Right.
Could be.
Could be.
Absolutely.
But let's let's not make any mistake here.
The United States has had warships, usually at least one carrier battle group in the Gulf long before the Yemeni war began.
You know, essentially on a mission to maintain free passage of of free transit for especially petroleum tankers, bringing crude oil out of the petroleum producing states in the Gulf.
And they've been there for a long time.
They're still there.
And we know that they're flying strikes into Syria and Iraq and I think even as far as Afghanistan.
And so what was this warship doing there?
I'm not sure that I would subscribe to the idea that it was helping the Saudis enforce the blockade on Yemen.
Well, it just sounds so much like the Maddox to me like, hey, here we are mining our own business in international waters.
Yeah.
We dropped off some special forces the other day that are doing some killing in there.
Could be.
Yeah.
No, there was no second torpedo attack at all.
And oops, you know, it makes for a great, you know, narrative anyway.
It does.
There's no doubt.
Yeah.
And I think we can say, too, that if the Russians were patrolling off of our coast just to make sure that oil can make it into the Gulf of Mexico without being obstructed, while at the same time their advisers were helping the Mexicans bomb Texas, we wouldn't look like at their Navy as though it was separate from their military's war against the people of Texas being waged out of Mexico.
Right.
I hear you.
That's all one thing.
Blockade or not, it's all one war and one big military attack against them, even if that particular ship's not firing.
Except I don't think that the United States patrols to maintain freedom of navigation in the Gulf has anything to do with U.S. petroleum supplies because we don't get most of our oil out of there.
But our allies do, particularly Japan.
Well, never mind that.
I'm just saying if if that's what they were there for was guaranteeing safe passage.
Right.
Right.
And then but their air force was also bombing our country at the same time.
We would go, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Safe passage with your warships off our coast while you're bombing us.
It's very possible.
Yes.
Right.
Yeah.
I'm just trying to put the shoe on the other foot a little bit.
I hear you.
I hear you.
All right, cool.
So and then so now.
Well, I want to get back to the lawyers here for a second.
So it sounds to me like somebody and I don't want you to give away too much or anything.
I know you have your craft and all of that here, Jonathan.
But it sounds like possibly the reason that somebody came to you complaining about this was because they weren't allowed to finish their job coming to their legal study conclusion about whether they were possibly breaking the law or not.
Even raising the question was enough to maybe get them shut down.
No, I'm happy to answer that question, Scott.
No, no one came to us.
This began by us.
It was the filing.
Yeah, it was the FOIA request and getting those documents and then going out to find people to talk to about about what was it, what we found, the limited amount of information that we found in the the documents because they were very heavily redacted.
Well, we were able to and we were able to find people who were willing to talk about this.
Yeah, that's good.
And they told you, hey, we're really worried.
I mean, they know they're not going to get dragged off to the Hague, but they want to be able to visit Europe without having to worry about maybe getting dragged off to the Hague from somewhere in France.
Right.
And that's a real thing.
Right.
Like it sounds unthinkable, but there are certain Republicans in our society right now who cannot travel to Europe.
Isn't that correct?
I believe like Donald Rumsfeld.
Yeah, but that's not because of an ICC case.
Oh, you're right that that's about France and Spain.
Right.
I believe I'm trying to remember who exactly put that put that out there.
But that's not an ICC because the United States doesn't belong, even though the United States was, in fact, the progenitor of the ICC.
Don't forget, Bush never agreed to join it.
Right.
So Obama hasn't either.
Which court, by the way, was it the ICC that they used against Charles Taylor or something else?
Yeah, I believe.
No.
In fact, I think it was a special tribunal.
I see.
All right.
Cool.
But it was a war crimes tribunal.
Right.
And listen, I mean, we all know the law doesn't apply.
And it was a U.N.-backed court.
I see.
You know, it was one that was legitimated by the United Nations.
Right.
Well, you know, we all know that no American politician of this level is ever going to be held responsible for things they do like that.
But at least it's interesting to see when the law that they really have forced on the world over the last couple of generations since the end of World War II.
It's it's our international law, as they call it, the rules-based world order.
It's our rules, but they don't ever apply to us, which I think is maybe part of why the rest of the world is sick of going along with them at this point.
I don't think that's true, Scott.
I think that that we do abide by international rules when it suits us.
Let's not forget, you know, there's been a there's been a major denigration of these rules.
And I'd like to and I trace that beginning back with the NATO intervention in Kosovo under the Clinton administration, where, you know, the U.N. Security Council, because the Russian and I don't know, I don't remember if there was a Chinese veto, but there was a Russian opposition to approving a U.N. backed intervention against the Serbs and the atrocities they were perpetrating in Kosovo.
And so NATO undertook that by itself without U.N. backing.
And you've seen sort of, you know, the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq and now what the Russians have been doing in in Syria and the and and the Ukraine.
This has been this this sort of erosion of the rules that you were talking about has been pretty steady.
And yes, the United States has been part of that problem.
Yeah.
And in Syria and Ukraine as well.
Indeed.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, it's great work as always.
And it's good to see you back with your old buddy Warren there, too.
And I can't wait.
Where's the movie come out?
This guy, they made a movie about what a great reporter this guy is.
When's the movie come out?
Well, there were in the middle of making it and I'm really not supposed to talk about it.
So I'm just going to leave it at that.
All right.
Well, they're making a movie and it's about Landay.
All right.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
Anytime, Scott.
All right.
All right, y'all.
That's a great Jonathan Landay.
Reuters, Reuters dot com.
And this is a real important one.
As Saudis bombed Yemen, U.S. worried about legal blowback.
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