© Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
Documents reveal that diplomats warned Obama that Saudi Arabia would commit war crimes in Yemen, but the sale proceeded anyway.
Despite stern and repeated warnings from their own diplomatic staff that U.S. weaponry would almost certainly be used to commit war crimes against Yemeni citizens, the Obama Administration nevertheless approved US$1.3 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia, according to documents published Monday by the Reuters news agency.
During the period in 2015, when the Pentagon was considering weapons sales to its longtime ally, Saudi Arabia,
the State Department warned the Obama administration that the U.S. could be implicated in war crimes committed by the Saudi kingdom. The Saudis launched a coalition effort in support of embattled Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi's loyalists in their ongoing conflict against the country's Houthi tribe.
According to documents obtained by Reuters following a Freedom of Information Act request,
Pentagon officials informed the White House of their doubts that Saudi forces would be able to target rebels without also killing civilians or destroying "critical infrastructure." By 2015, it was already apparent to U.S. diplomats that Saudi air strikes were killing thousands of Yemeni civilians."The strikes are not intentionally indiscriminate but rather result from a lack of Saudi experience with dropping munitions and firing missiles," said a specialist from the State Department while meeting with human rights groups, according to the documents obtained by Reuters under a freedom of information request.
Comment: It's an admirable sentiment but those leaders (i.e. the U.S. and its allies) who are chiefly responsible for the world's growing chaos are far too intent on achieving their aims of global conquest to work with those who are attempting to find solutions, seeing them as only roadblocks to world domination.