All posts tagged: Yemen

US, UAE operate network of torture chambers in Yemen

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by Niles Niemuth , 27 June 2017, WSWS  The United States and United Arab Emirates (UAE), in coordination with Yemeni proxy forces, are operating a network of torture chambers in the war-torn country into which hundreds of men have been disappeared. As revealed by an Associated Press (AP) report published last week, the US and UAE have established a network of at least 18 secret prisons in Yemen used for torturing and interrogating men who are suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The brutal torture regime began under the Obama administration and continues under President Donald Trump. According to the AP report, the US operates with a mostly hands-off approach in which it provides lists of names of men to be detained and then provides the torturers with lists of questions to be asked to detainees. After tormenting and interrogating detainees, the UAE transmits transcripts and videos of confessions to US officials. However, a Yemeni officer reported to the AP that he witnessed at least two detainees brought to ships …

The Rogue State that is the United States of America

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from New Antarctica As one more US aircraft carrier steams off to confront the North Koreans and threaten nuclear war once again , it is timely to recall that 60 years ago the United States and its allies (including a very compliant New Zealand) began a genocidal bombing of every town and city in the north of Korea. Millions of Koreans died. Since that war ended, the largest and nuclear superpower in the world has refused to sign a peace treaty with North Korea, has stationed thousands of troops and weapons along its South Korean border and has regularly threatened to nuke North Korea, applied annual large scale attack manoeuvres along the border with North Korea, as well as implementing sanctions that in several years since the war, caused mass starvation in the north. Small wonder that the North Korean regime might be considered paranoid and unstable! Ironically, the United States has absolutely no interest in the Korean peninsula and its peoples; its sole rationale for maintaining the ongoing conflict with North Korea is to …

“Remember the Mason!” – US attacks Houthis in Yemen

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Four days ago, after reports that Saudi Arabia had bombed a funeral in Yemen killing 140 mourners, America announced it would “review its support” for the Saudi-led coalition. Three days ago the USS Mason, an American destroyer in the patrolling the Red Sea, was apparently fired upon from Yemen. It has gone unquestioned in the Western MSM that the Houthis were behind this attack, despite strong denials from the Houthis themselves.

Menwith Menace: Britain’s Complicity In Saudi Arabia’s Terror Campaign Against Yemen

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from Media Lens The ‘mainstream’ Western media is, almost by definition, the last place to consult for honest reporting of Western crimes. Consider the appalling case of Yemen which is consumed by war and an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. Since March 2015, a ‘coalition’ of Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by the US, Britain and France, has been dropping bombs on neighbouring Yemen. The scale of the bombing is indicated in a recent article by Felicity Arbuthnot – in one year, 330,000 homes, 648 mosques, 630 schools and institutes, and 250 health facilities were destroyed or damaged. The stated aim of Saudi Arabia’s devastating assault on Yemen is to reinstate the Yemeni president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and to hold back Houthi rebels who are allied with the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Saudis assert that the Houthis, who control Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, are ‘proxies’ for Iran: always a convenient propaganda claim to elicit Western backing and ‘justify’ intervention. Philip Hammond, who was UK defence secretary when the Saudi bombing began in …

America’s Recent Achievements in the Middle East

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by Eric Zuesse Here are before-and-after pictures of what the U.S. government has achieved, in the Middle East: What’s especially interesting there, is that in all of these missions, except for Iraq, the U.S. was doing it with the key participation of the Saud family, the royals who own Saudi Arabia, and who are the world’s largest buyers of American weaponry. Since Barack Obama came into the White House, the operations — Libya, Yemen, and Syria — have been, to a large extent, joint operations with the Sauds. ‘We’ are now working more closely with ‘our’ ‘friends’, even than ‘we’ were under George W. Bush. As President Obama instructed his military, on 28 May 2014: When issues of global concern do not pose a direct threat to the United States, when such issues are at stake — when crises arise that stir our conscience or push the world in a more dangerous direction but do not directly threaten us — then the threshold for military action must be higher. In such circumstances, we should not go it alone. Instead, we must mobilize allies and partners to take collective action. …

Making a Killing: The 1.2 Billion Euros Arms Pipeline to Middle East

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by Lawrence Marzouk, Ivan Angelovski and Miranda Patrucic via Balkan Insight An unprecedented flow of weapons from Central and Eastern Europe is flooding the battlefields of the Middle East. As Belgrade slept on the night of November 28, 2015, the giant turbofan engines of a Belarusian Ruby Star Ilyushin II-76 cargo plane roared into life, its hull laden with arms destined for faraway conflicts. Rising from the tarmac of Nikola Tesla airport, the hulking aircraft pierced the Serbian mist to head towards Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was one of at least 68 flights that in just 13 months transported weapons and ammunition to Middle Eastern states and Turkey which, in turn, funnelled arms into brutal civil wars in Syria and Yemen, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP, has found. The flights form just a small part of €1.2 billion in arms deals between the countries since 2012, when parts of the Arab Spring turned into an armed conflict. Meanwhile, over the past two years, as thousands …

Syria: French Academic Exposes Left-Wing Charlatans as Harbingers of Terrorism

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by Bruno Guigue,  21st Century Wire Following the death of a prominent leader of the Arab-Lebanese resistance, murdered by the Zionist forces while on Syrian soil, I address this open letter to all left-wing  intellectuals and activists who have aligned themselves with the Syrian “revolution” and believe that by dreaming of the fall of Damascus, they are defending the Palestinian cause. In the spring of 2011, you were telling us that the Arab revolutions represented an unprecedented hope for the peoples living under oppressive, bloodthirsty tyrants.  Our excessive optimism persuaded us to listen to your arguments for this miraculously flourishing democracy and your proclamations on the universal human rights. You almost persuaded us that these popular uprisings deposing the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators were going to universally sweep tyranny from the Arab world, in Libya as in Syria, in Yemen as in Bahrain and who knows where else. However the flaws in this evolving narrative began to reveal themselves. The first glaring flaw appeared in Libya. A UN resolution, adopted by the Security Council to …

Open Letter: A Russian Warning

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from Club Orlov We, the undersigned, are Russians living and working in the USA. We have been watching with increasing anxiety as the current US and NATO policies have set us on an extremely dangerous collision course with the Russian Federation, as well as with China. Many respected, patriotic Americans, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Stephen Cohen, Philip Giraldi, Ray McGovern and many others have been issuing warnings of a looming a Third World War. But their voices have been all but lost among the din of a mass media that is full of deceptive and inaccurate stories that characterize the Russian economy as being in shambles and the Russian military as weak—all based on no evidence. But we—knowing both Russian history and the current state of Russian society and the Russian military, cannot swallow these lies. We now feel that it is our duty, as Russians living in the US, to warn the American people that they are being lied to, and to tell them the truth. And the truth is simply this: If …

President Obama: The Race for the Imperial Legacy

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by James Petras, via 99GetSmart Introduction President Obama is racing forward to establish his imperial legacy throughout Russia, Asia and Latin America. In the last two years he has accelerated the buildup of his military nuclear arsenal on the frontiers of Russia. The Pentagon has designed a high tech anti-missile system to undermine Russian defenses. In Latin America, Obama has shed his shallow pretense of tolerating the center-left electoral regimes. Instead he is has joined with rabid authoritarian net-liberals in Argentina; met with the judges and politicians engineering the overthrow of the current Brazilian government; and encouraged the emerging far-right regimes in Peru under Keiko Fujimori and Colombia under President Santos. In Asia, Obama has clearly escalated a military build-up threatening China’s principle waterways in the South China Sea. Obama encouraged aggressive and violent separatist groupings in Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan. Obama invites Beijing billionaires to relocate a trillion dollars in assets to the ‘laundry machines’ of North America, Europe and Asia. Meanwhile he has actively blocked China’s long-planned commercial ‘silk route’ across Myanmar and west Asia. In …

Trump the “Fascist”: Backdoor Backing of a Political Psychopath Named Hillary Clinton

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by James Petras, via 99GetSmart From left to right a raucous chorus has emerged to denounce Republican Presidential primary frontrunner Donald Trump as a ‘fascist’. They cite his campaign promises to build an Israeli-style wall along the US border; his threats to expel eleven million undocumented immigrants; and to restrict foreign Muslims from entering the US, as well as the way his pugnacious face and arm resemble those of Benito Mussolini (‘he juts out his chin, he raises his arm’). They decry his extreme nationalism as ‘resembling Hitler’s policy’, by which they mean his opposition to detrimental free trade agreements and his slogan to “Make America Great.. Again.” In this article I will critically address the current cartoonish image of fascism with fascism’s historical reality, and then proceed to analyze the so-called “lesser evil” politics behind the re-invention of an American fascist in the guise of billionaire Donald Trump. Fascism: Fact and Fiction Historically, fascist politics involved organized mass movements, armed militia and paramilitary groups who assaulted political opponents and violently censored critical speech and suppressed the right to assemble. Fascists scapegoated minorities, especially …

A New Saudi War Crime in Yemen

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by Vaska As FortRuss reported on January 6, the Saudi Air Force has bombed a centre for the blind in the Yemeni capital Sana’a, leaving at least 3 dead. The raid took place at night, while the residents of the centre were asleep.  Exact information on the number of casualties is still not available. “These blind children are made to be the target of airstrikes?  Where are the NGO’s?  Where is the UN?” [….]  It should be noted that Saudi Arabia have committed dozens of war crimes on the territory of Yemen. For example, only recently Saudi warplanes have attacked schools, hospitals, roads where there were no military targets, factory of Coca-Cola, a dairy farm, and 2 industrial enterprises. So far, there’s been a complete lack of reaction on the part of the EU, the individual European countries themselves, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, as well as international human rights organizations and the UN itself. Illustrations courtesy of FortRuss  

Spokesman: Yemeni army ready to invade Saudi border cities

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A Houthi militia fighter in Yemen. Al Masdar News reports: The Yemeni army spokesman General Sharaf Loqman told Al-Manar website that the preliminary operations have ended and that the strategic escalation stage has started. “We are ready to escalate operations, and the leadership will settle all the details,” the Yemeni officer said. “The Yemeni army and popular committees have surrounded the two Saudi cities of Jizan and Najran and the political leadership will take the decision of invading them,” he added. Luqman noted that the Yemeni army and popular committees are advancing in the various provinces and confronting the Saudi-led terrorists, adding that all the attempts to reach local ceasefire agreements are rejected because the aim is to expel all the terrorists. General Luqman pointed out that the Yemeni army and popular committees withdrew from the south to let the locals defend their cities. “However, Qaeda and ISIL terrorists have controlled the area, especially in Aden and Hadramout,” he concluded. Houthi fighters, allied to Yemen’s army, on a tour of Al-Rabuah town in Assir province, Saudi …

Report: Saudi Arabia stuck in quagmire in Yemen

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Press TV reports: Some eight months into the deadly Saudi war against Yemen, the Riyadh regime now seems stuck in a quagmire, without a clear strategy to end the costly military campaign in “a face-saving way,” a report says. The report, published by The Washington Post on Friday, outlined the economic and political challenges facing the Al Saud family due to the war it has waged against Yemen as well as mounting pressure on Riyadh even by some of its own allies due to the high number of civilian casualties caused in the war. “This war is draining the Saudis militarily, politically, strategically,” the Post quoted Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemen analyst at the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center, as saying. “The problem is they’re stuck there.” Since late March, Saudi Arabia has been involved in a military campaign against Yemen supposedly with the aim of weakening the country’s Ansarullah movement and returning the government of fugitive former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, its staunch ally, to power. Referring to a growing rift in the coalition …

Amnesty International: “Damning evidence” US may be complicit in Yemen war crimes

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US-made BLU-97 submunitions used by Saudi Arabia-led coallition in Saada, Yemen, on May 23 2015 Damning evidence of war crimes by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, which is armed by states including the USA, highlights the urgent need for independent, effective investigation of violations in Yemen and for the suspension of transfers of certain arms, said Amnesty International in a new report published today. ‘Bombs fall from the sky day and night’: Civilians under fire in northern Yemen examines 13 deadly airstrikes by the coalition in Sa’da, north-eastern Yemen, which killed some 100 civilians, including 59 children. It also documents the use of internationally banned cluster bombs. “This report uncovers yet more evidence of unlawful airstrikes carried out by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, some of which amount to war crimes. It demonstrates in harrowing detail how crucial it is to stop arms being used to commit serious violations of this kind,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s Senior Crisis Response Adviser who headed the organization’s fact-finding mission to Yemen. “The USA and other states exporting weapons to …

Opinion: “I’m confused”

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Who remembers the children of Donbass? British journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger Neil Clark writes: […] The first thing I’m confused about is the refugee crisis currently affecting Europe. The vast majority of refugees are coming from countries e.g. Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, which were targeted by the West for ‘regime change’ and which experienced bombing/invasion or destabilization by NATO powers and their regional allies. We’re told by the West’s political elite and much of the media that in order to stop the influx of refugees to Europe we need to do more bombing. But if bombing solves the problem of refugees, why are people fleeing from countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya that the West has already bombed? How can more bombs and intervention solve a problem caused by bombs and intervention? And how can the imposition of a no-fly zone in Syria stop ISIS, which doesn’t have an air force? I’m confused. Can anyone help me? On the subject of Syria I’m confused about the West’s obsession with toppling President Assad …

US is “de facto ally” of ISIS in Yemen

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from Aletho News Turns out the United States and the Islamic State, ISIS, are de facto allies of Saudi Arabia and its alliance of dictator states, all bent on exterminating Yemeni Houthis and pretty much any other Yemeni in the neighborhood. This Yemenicide started in earnest in March 2015. After years of US drone strikes proved too slow and ineffective at wiping out people in the poorest country in the Arab world, it was time to expand the arsenal of war crimes. Rarely, in discussions of Yemen, does one hear much about the violations of international law that have reduced the country to its present war-torn and devastated condition. Failing to acknowledge a foreign policy disaster in Yemen, the Obama administration has chosen instead to trash international law by supporting the criminal, aggressive war that Saudi Arabia’s coalition of police states launched on Yemen on March 26. Now, despite more than three months of Saudi-American terror bombing, the Houthis remain in control of northwest Yemen, their tribal homeland, as well as much of the southeast …

Chaos Descending on Saudi Politics?

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by Vaska According to the latest from FarsNews, “US Secretary of State John Kerry is asking Iran to help facilitate Yemen peace talks. Interestingly, Iran has been the one pushing for peace, while the US has loudly endorsed the Saudi war crimes. Now US officials seem to admit the aerial campaign has failed and that Iran is the key to getting the resistance movement of Ansarullah to the negotiating table.” The Iranian description of Saudi actions in Yemen as war crimes is factually accurate according to international law. The news of Washington’s change of heart, if itself accurate, will be welcome in Yemen as the country is now facing a humanitarian emergency which requires an immediate ceasefire. As we reported earlier today, only two days ago, in what can only have been an act of pure and infantile imperial spite, the U.S. had blocked an emergency UN Security Council resolution Russia had brought up calling for immediate ceasefire in Yemen and the start of negotiations — both badly needed so that humanitarian aid can reach …

U.S.-enabled Saudi War Crimes in Yemen

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by Vaska During an emergency closed-door Security Council session on Yemen held on May 1, the U.S. blocked a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire necessary to address the growing humanitarian crisis in the country. Washington’s refusal to support a humanitarian ceasefire for Yemen comes despite the mid-April finding by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization that food reserves in the country were running out and despite reports by the International Committee of the Red Cross of “an alarming shortage of virtually everything needed to sustain life.” Before the UNSC emergency meeting two days ago, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had himself stepped in to point out that fuel shortages now threaten to bring all relief operations to a halt “‘within days, echoing alarm from the International Red Cross and other embattled aid agencies.” The war crimes the Saudis are committing in Yemen have not been reported or identified as such by any of our mainstream media. Nor has Washington’s role in enabling those war crimes drawn any criticism from the Western press. Here’s a brief …