Thursday, June 25, 2020

Why Bombs Made in America Have Been Killing Civilians in Yemen


Friends,

  This original article is a very long expose by The New York Times.  I am sending out a portion of this sordid story.  If you want to read the complete article, let me know.

Kagiso, Max


  Why Bombs Made in America Have Been Killing Civilians in Yemen

President Trump sees arms deals as jobs generators for firms like Raytheon, which has made billions in sales to the Saudi coalition. The Obama administration initially backed the Saudis too, but later regretted it as thousands died.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/05/17/multimedia/16yemenarms-print/merlin_172289529_be24c98e-b907-41e3-b70b-84f76d2a5824-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale

A Saudi-led bombing of a funeral hall in Sana, Yemen, in 2016 killed at least 140 people and injured another 500. A bomb shard was linked to the American company Raytheon. Credit...AP Photo/Hani Mohammed


May 16, 2020

Year after year, the bombs fell — on wedding tents, funeral halls, fishing boats and a school bus, killing thousands of civilians and helping turn Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Weapons supplied by American companies, approved by American officials, allowed Saudi Arabia to pursue the reckless campaign. But in June 2017, an influential Republican senator decided to cut them off, by withholding approval for new sales. It was a moment that might have stopped the slaughter.
Not under President Trump.

With billions at stake, one of the president’s favored aides, the combative trade adviser Peter Navarro, made it his mission to reverse the senator. Mr. Navarro, after consulting with American arms makers, wrote a memo to Jared Kushner and other top White House officials calling for an intervention, possibly by Mr. Trump himself. He titled it “Trump Mideast arms sales deal in extreme jeopardy, job losses imminent.”

Within weeks, the Saudis were once again free to buy American weapons.
The intervention, which has not been previously reported, underscores a fundamental change in American foreign policy under Mr. Trump that often elevates economic considerations over other ones. Where foreign arms sales in the past were mostly offered and withheld to achieve diplomatic goals, the Trump administration pursues them mainly for the profits they generate and the jobs they create, with little regard for how the weapons are used.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/05/16/multimedia/16yemenarms-2/merlin_171237012_e3321656-0b02-45d2-a44e-8dcd3c42d147-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale

President Trump has encharged his trade adviser Peter Navarro with growing American manufacturing, particularly in the arms industry. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Trump has tapped Mr. Navarro, a California economist best known for polemics against China, to be a conduit between the Oval Office and defense [sic] firms. His administration has also rewritten the rules for arms exports, speeding weapon sales to foreign militaries. The State Department, responsible for licensing arms deals, now is charged with more aggressively promoting them.

“This White House has been more open to defense [sic] industry executives than any other in living memory,” said Loren B. Thompson, a longtime analyst who consults for major arms manufacturers.

No foreign entanglement has revealed the trade-offs of this policy more than the war in Yemen. There, Mr. Trump’s embrace of arms sales has helped prolong a conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people in the Arab world’s poorest nation, further destabilizing an already volatile region, according to a review of thousands of pages of records and interviews with more than 50 people with knowledge of the policy or who participated in the decision-making.

American arms makers who sell to the Saudis say they are accountable to shareholders and are doing nothing wrong. And because weapon sales to foreign militaries must be approved by the State Department, the companies say they don’t make policy, only follow it.

“The Weekly” — Watch how arms sales to Middle Eastern allies that were meant to shore up American jobs are contributing to a humanitarian crisis: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/the-weekly/saudi-arabia-yemen-raytheon.html.
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“Our economic policy can be summed up in three very beautiful and simple words.” It’s a common refrain. “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” “You’re talking about jobs. What I’m doing here, we’ve created an incredible economy.” But when promises of jobs are tied to the arms trade, where do we draw the line? And what happens when this promise collides with the mistakes of a previous administration? “We found ourselves locked into this terrible situation, unable to wrap it up and handing it off to an administration that was going to handle it even worse than we did.” It’s a scenario that has plunged the U.S. deeper into one of the world’s most catastrophic conflicts. “These were not mistakes. These were deliberate and precise attacks, and everybody in Yemen knows that the bombs causing this suffering are made in the United States.”
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Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

But as the situation in Yemen worsened, at least one firm, Raytheon Company, did more than wait for decisions by American officials. It went to great lengths to influence them, even after members of Congress tried to upend sales to Saudi Arabia on humanitarian grounds.

Raytheon, a major supplier of weapons to the Saudis, including some implicated by human rights groups in the deaths of Yemeni civilians, has long viewed the kingdom as one of its most important foreign customers.

After the Yemen war began in 2015 and the Obama administration made a hasty decision to back the Saudis, Raytheon booked more than $3 billion in new bomb sales, according to an analysis of available U.S. government records.
Intent on pushing the deals through, Raytheon followed the industry playbook: It took advantage of federal loopholes by sending former State Department officials, who were not required to be registered as lobbyists, to press their former colleagues to approve the sales.

And though the company was already embedded in Washington — its chief lobbyist, Mark Esper, would become Army secretary and then defense secretary under Mr. Trump — Raytheon executives sought even closer ties.

They assiduously courted Mr. Navarro, who intervened with White House officials on Raytheon’s behalf and successfully pressured the State Department, diminished under Mr. Trump, to process the most contentious deals.

They also enlisted the help of David J. Urban, a lobbyist whose close ties to Mr. Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo go back to the 1980s, when all three men were at West Point.

As the nation turned against the war, a range of American officials — Democratic and Republican — tried three times to halt the killing by blocking arms sales to the Saudis. Their efforts were undone by the White House, largely at the urging of Raytheon.

Approached a half-dozen times, Raytheon representatives declined to speak with reporters about foreign sales. “We believe further dialogue regarding foreign military sales is best directed to officials in the U.S. government,” Corinne Kovalsky, then a company spokeswoman, said in December.

Lawmakers from both parties have condemned the continued arms sales in the Yemen war, expressing both humanitarian and security concerns: Some of the weapons have wound up in the hands of militant Islamic groups in the country.
“We don’t know how these weapons are really being used or whether they may be turned against U.S. troops in the future,” said Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, who has publicly criticized the administration’s approach to the conflict. “This war was never authorized by Congress.”

Others say the president’s arms sale policies diminish the United States.
“People look to us. We’re the only country in the world that is ever capable of using this immense power that we have in a way that’s more than just about our naked self-interest,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, a New Jersey Democrat who was born in Communist Poland and led the State Department’s human rights bureau under President Barack Obama.

“President Trump has proudly said that we should continue to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia because they pay us a lot of money,” Mr. Malinowski said. “He seems to see foreign policy in the way he viewed the real estate business — every country is like a company and our job is to make money.”
The Trump administration has defended arms sales to Saudi Arabia as being vital to job growth and the American economy.

“We’ve created an incredible economy,” Mr. Trump told Fox Business in October 2018, after the killing of the journalist and American resident Jamal Khashoggi sparked calls to stop selling to the Saudis. “I want Boeing and I want Lockheed and I want Raytheon to take those orders and to hire lots of people to make that incredible equipment.”

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/05/17/multimedia/16yemenarms-3-print/merlin_156803004_92f86811-a9d9-480d-bdbd-3c7def1976fc-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale
Raytheon hired former U.S. officials to press for approval of arms deals with Saudi Arabia, one of its most important clients. Credit...Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

  Records show that foreign military sales, facilitated by the U.S. government, rose sharply after Mr. Trump became president. They averaged about $51 billion a year during Mr. Trump’s first three years, compared with $36 billion a year during the final term of Mr. Obama, who also oversaw a big increase.
Arms industry groups say defense [sic] jobs rose more than 3.5 percent to about 880,000 during Mr. Trump’s first two years, though the numbers, the most recent available, do not specify how many were in manufacturing.

The White House referred requests for comment to the National Security Council, where a spokesman said that “Iran and its Houthi proxies” had targeted Saudi Arabia and had endangered Americans. “We remain committed to supporting Saudi Arabia’s right to defend against those threats, while urging that all appropriate measures are taken to prevent civilian casualties,” said the spokesman, John Ullyot.

To be continued.

Donations can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212.  Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

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