Trump May Further Escalate Aggression in Yemen
by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman)
Nearly straightaway after taking office, Trump escalated Obama’s war in Yemen – orchestrated by his regime, featuring Saudi-led terror-bombing.
Since launched in March 2015, targets have included residential areas, hospitals, schools, refugee camps, food storage areas, mosques, marketplaces, wedding parties, and other nonmilitary sites – high crimes against peace, massacring civilians in cold blood, atrocities committed with impunity.
The death toll is many multiples higher than the official low-ball figure, disgracefully downplaying the severity of what continues with full US/UK support and encouragement.
Both countries are the kingdom’s main suppliers of terror weapons and munitions, including banned toxic agents and cluster bombs – used against defenseless civilians as well as Houthi combatants.
Over three years of war, along with suffocating land, sea and airspace blockade, created the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis, giving new meaning to nightmarish conditions – getting scant major media coverage, so-called US television news ignoring it altogether.
Everything conceivable is harming devastated Yemenis, suffering and perishing from horrific war, untreated diseases, an unchecked cholera epidemic affecting over one million people, a healthcare system near collapse, severe malnutrition, starvation, and the world community failing to intervene responsibly to stop the carnage.
An entire population is at risk. Millions could perish, likely hundreds of thousands already dead or too far gone to save.
According to the Military Times and Wall Street Journal, the Trump regime may escalate an already devastating conflict.
The despotic UAE, allied with Saudi terror war, asked for US help to capture the Houthi-held Hodeidah port city.
Handling most commercial imports and critically needed humanitarian supplies able to get in, losing it would be catastrophic.
According to the WSJ, Trump regime officials have “lot(s) of concerns about a Hodeidah operation,” one official saying:
“We are not 100 percent comfortable that, even if the coalition did launch an attack, that they would be able to do it cleanly and avoid a catastrophic incident.”
In 2017, a nonbinding congressional resolution called US military involvement unauthorized. Senate member blocked a measure to end military support for the war.
Washington has been at war in Yemen since the Bush/Cheney regime began drone terror-bombings in 2002. Obama greatly escalated what they began.
Trump continues his drone war, along with partnering with Saudi-led terror-bombing – exacerbating humanitarian crisis conditions instead of alleviating them.
US special forces are covertly operating in Yemen, committing war crimes along Saudi-led aggression.
The Pentagon lied claiming US operations are limited to intelligence sharing and logistical support. US forces are up to their ears in combat.
They’re involved with a network of UAE-run torture prisons. According to AP News, a horrendous abuse involves the “grill.” Victims tied to it are roasted alive over a circle of fire.
Department of Defense officials lied claiming US forces are involved in interrogations of Yemeni detainees, not torture or other human rights abuses.
Both practices go hand-in-hand. New CIA director Gina Haspel was Langley’s torturer-in-chief, the practice surely continuing on her watch.
AP News said said it “documented at least 18 clandestine lockups across southern Yemen run by the United Arab Emirates or by Yemeni forces created and trained by the Gulf nation, drawing on accounts from former detainees, families of prisoners, civil rights lawyers and Yemeni military officials,” adding:
“All are either hidden or off limits to Yemen’s government, which has been getting Emirati help in its civil war with rebels over the last two years.”
“The secret prisons are inside military bases, ports, an airport, private villas and even a nightclub. Some detainees have been flown to an Emirati base across the Red Sea in Eritrea, according to Yemen Interior Minister Hussein Arab and others.”
According to Defense Department spokeswoman Dana White, “(w)e always adhere to the highest standards of personal and professional conduct…(W)e are obligated to report any violations of human rights” – bald-faced lies.
Torture is longstanding US policy, notably under Bush/Cheney, continued under Obama and Trump.
Will Trump order greater escalation of aggression in Yemen than already to take Hodeidah.
According to an anonymous US official, “(w)e have folks who are frustrated and ready to say: ‘Let’s do this. We’ve been flirting with this for a long time. Something needs to change the dynamic, and if we help the Emiratis do it better, this could be good.”
If Trump regime hawks get their way, Yemen’s bloody conflict may get bloodier.
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