01/27/16 – Marjorie Cohn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our next guest today is Marjorie Cohn.
She is a professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and former president of the National Lawyers Guild.
Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing, Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.
Her website is MarjorieCohn.com.
Welcome back, Marjorie.
How are you?
Fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, very happy to have you here.
Great work, as always.
Saudi Arabia is killing civilians with U.S. bombs, reads the headline at TelaserTV.net.
Saudi Arabia is killing civilians with U.S. bombs by Marjorie Cohn.
Those are your search terms, everybody.
State your case, ma'am, please.
Well, Saudi Arabia has killed 2,800 civilians, including 500 children in Yemen.
This is part of a regional power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
And the United States is the primary supplier of Saudi weapons.
In November, the U.S. sold $1.29 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia.
And a month earlier, the U.S. approved $11.25 billion in sales of combat ships.
During the last five years, the U.S. government has sold the Saudis $100 billion worth of arms.
And, of course, we know who's getting rich, the defense contractors.
But the United States knows that Saudi Arabia is killing civilians, and it's illegal to target civilians under the Geneva Conventions and also under U.S. law.
There is a law called the Leahy Law, which prohibits U.S. assistance to any foreign security forces or military officers if the Secretary of State has credible information that they are committing gross violations of human rights.
And there's another federal statute.
There's the Arms Trade Treaty, which the United States has signed but not ratified.
But even when we sign a treaty, we can't take any action inconsistent with the object and purpose of the treaty.
Now, on January the 6th, U.S. cluster bombs were dropped by the Saudi coalition on residential neighborhoods in Yemen's capital.
And a U.S. Department of Defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told U.S. News and World Report, quote, the U.S. is aware that Saudi Arabia has used cluster munitions in Yemen, unquote.
118 countries have signed an international treaty banning cluster bombs because of their widespread fragments that are lethal to civilians.
They don't always explode and then kids pick them up and they go off and the kids are killed or maimed.
And Human Rights Watch said the inherently indiscriminate nature of cluster bombs makes such attacks serious violations of the laws of war amounting to a war crime.
Now, the United States is aiding and abetting these war crimes.
Aiding and abetting is a very standard criminal law principle where, and it's defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, but the Rome Statute sets forth standard criminal aiding and abetting procedures.
And that is that an individual can be convicted of war crimes, and that means one of the U.S. leaders or even Congress, if he or she aids, abets, or otherwise assists in the commission or attempted commission of the crime, including providing the means for its commission.
And the United States government is certainly providing the weapons that the Saudis are using to kill civilians and also not just large numbers of civilians with bombs, but in January, the world was horrified when we heard that the Saudi government had executed 47 people, including a prominent pacifist Shiite cleric who had been a leader of the 2011 Arab Spring in Saudi Arabia, and many of those executed were tortured during their detention and denied due process.
Most of them were beheaded.
Now this horrifies us understandably when ISIS beheads people, and yet the State Department spokesman made a weak protest saying, quote, we believe that diplomatic engagement and direct conversations remain essential in working through differences.
I mean, that's outrageous.
It's just outrageous.
Now then on January 23rd, which was I believe Saturday, an explosive report came out in the New York Times, and this kind of explains the, we know that Saudi Arabia and the United States have a very close working relationship for many years, but this report says that Obama secretly authorized the CIA to begin arming Syria's rebels, whoever the opposition forces are, and it's not clear that he's really arming the proper opposition forces or anyone that really is an opposition force, in 2013, and since then the CIA and Saudi Arabia have been working together.
The Saudis contribute weapons and large sums of money for the bombing in Syria, and the CIA takes the lead in training the rebels on AK-47 assault rifles and tank-destroying missiles.
This is called Timber Sycamore, and there's been a long relationship between the CIA and the spy services of Saudi Arabia during Iran-Contra.
Saudi Arabia gave $1 million a month to fund the Contras in a secret program that was illegal, we knew that, and they gave money to support the Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, we know what happened there, they turned into Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and Saudi Arabia gave $7 billion in the U.S. proxy fight in Angola in the 1980s, where the CIA was trying to defeat the rebels in Angola that was backed by the Soviet government.
So then, another really interesting twist in all of this, Scott, is that the Saudis contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation before Hillary became Secretary of State, and in 2011, the year after the State Department had documented several serious human rights violations by Saudi Arabia, Hillary, as Secretary of State, oversaw a $29 billion sale of advanced fighter jets to the Saudis, declaring that it was in our national interest.
And Andrew Shapiro, an Assistant Secretary of State, said that the deal was, quote, top priority, unquote, for Hillary, and two months before the deal was clinched, Boeing, which manufactured one of the fighter jets the Saudis wanted to acquire, contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation.
What's happening now?
Hillary now says the United States should pursue, quote, closer strategic cooperation, unquote, with Saudi Arabia.
Very, very worrisome.
And even as she admitted, thank you, Chelsea Manning, 35 years in the brig for America's government sins, we know from the WikiLeaks that she, herself, in her own words, said that the Saudis were the greatest financiers of anti-American terrorism on the planet.
You know, a reference to Al-Qaeda, and so-called private donations as well, but of course all of that is still at the pleasure of the Saudi royal family.
Right, exactly.
I mean, you know, if Iran had, was killing civilians in these numbers, was beheading people, was executing people, torturing them, you can bet that the United States and Israel would be all over it.
Outrage, sanctions, the whole nine yards.
But since Saudi Arabia is such a close ally of the United States, in bed with the U.S. government for years and years and years with these financial deals, you're not going to hear any protest, any realistic protest from the United States when this happens.
And we know that Saudi Arabia, we know how they treat women, we know that they behead people very frequently.
And David Sanger in the New York Times wrote that the United States has, quote, usually looked the other way or issued carefully calibrated warnings in human rights reports as the Saudi royal family cracked down on dissent and free speech and allowed its elite to fund Islamic extremists.
And in return, Sanger wrote, Saudi Arabia became America's most dependable filling station, a regular supplier of intelligence and a valuable counterweight to Iran.
Saudi Arabia, and we know that Israel, which is a very close U.S. ally, and Saudi Arabia both opposed the nuclear, the Iran nuclear deal.
So, you know, this is not just a question of money, it's also a question of doing the bidding of one of the closest U.S. allies, Israel.
And I think we've spoken before, Scott, about how the United States is largely uncritical of the human rights violations perpetrated by the Israelis against the Palestinians, the illegal settlements that they're building in Palestinian territories, et cetera.
Yeah.
And of course, what's funny here is the three excuses that he cites are all complete nonsense, right?
We hardly import any oil from Saudi Arabia whatsoever.
We get almost all of it that we import from the Western hemisphere.
And regular supplier of intelligence against, what, the same terrorists that America and Saudi are backing together in Syria right now, for example?
Or what are they even talking about?
And as far as a valuable counterweight to Iran, he doesn't have to explain the value there.
It just goes without saying what value we get out of them doing everything they can to sabotage any rapprochement with Iran when the last time we had a real fight with them was 35 years ago?
Well, yes.
In 1979, there was a revolution in Iran to throw out the Shah, the vicious tyrant.
Talk about a terrorist and a tyrant.
The U.S. had, in 1953, the U.S., and they've admitted this, the CIA engineered a coup, threw out the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh and installed the vicious Shah of Iran, who ruled with an iron fist for 25 years until the Iranian revolution in 1979.
And in 1979, it was a united front with a coalition of many different groups, but of course, unfortunately, we know that it became an Islamic theocracy and really provided a model for a lot of the horrible things we see today, blowback against U.S. policy.
I mean, this is not the first time the U.S. has overthrown a democratically elected government and installed a dictator.
We did that in Chile with Allende and installed Pinochet.
We did that in Guatemala.
We've done that in many countries.
And then, talking out of both sides of our mouth, right?
When one of our so-called enemies or an enemy of one of our so-called allies, such as Israel, engages in human rights violations, we scream and yell and impose sanctions but there's this double standard and no wonder the United States, I mean, we hear this American exceptionalism from our president, from people in our government.
You know, America's exceptional.
We're the leader of the world.
Well, most of the people in the rest of the world don't think so, especially when they see the United States illegally invading other countries, occupying their lands, torturing their people, you know, funding terrorism all in the guise of fighting this war on terror.
All right, now, I wanted to, and I know you've got to go here pretty soon, but I wanted to ask you a follow-up here real quick about the killing of civilians versus the targeting of civilians.
And this, in fact, involves the United States as well because the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, among others, have reported that the U.S. is helping the Saudis with their targeting, et cetera.
And so I wonder whether, is there proof that they are deliberately targeting civilians?
I already know the answer is yes, but I'd like to hear your answer to that and what you would cite, their deliberate targeting of civilians there and the difference between just seeing the results and knowing how they got that way because, of course, pretty much any military in the world would say, oops, we missed.
Well, yes, Scott.
I mean, a U.N. panel of experts concluded last October that the Saudi-led coalition had committed grave violations of civilians' human rights, and that included indiscriminate attacks, targeting markets, wherever civilians are, and targeting a camp for displaced Yemenis, targeting a humanitarian aid warehouse, and intentionally preventing the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
And the U.N. panel was also concerned, and this is a direct answer to your question, that the coalition considered civilian neighborhoods, including Mara and Sada, as legitimate strike zones.
So, yes, there is targeting of civilians, and the International Committee of the Red Cross documented 100 attacks on hospitals.
So, yes, there is targeting of civilians, and when you target an entire civilian neighborhood and hospitals and markets and warehouses where they have humanitarian assistance, yes, that's deliberate targeting of civilians.
Well, and journalist Matthew Akins has explained on the show what he witnessed with his own eyes of them destroying entire towns in the north there.
Right.
Which he had seen.
And then, well, I know, I've got to let you go.
I've got a million more, but we'll talk again soon.
Thank you so much for all your great writing and your time again on the show, Marjorie.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all, that is Marjorie Cohn.
She is professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and you can find this one at telusirtv.net.
Saudi Arabia is killing civilians with U.S. bombs.
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