What's new
Fantasy Football - Footballguys Forums

Welcome to Our Forums. Once you've registered and logged in, you're primed to talk football, among other topics, with the sharpest and most experienced fantasy players on the internet.

Yemen Attacks - Are we on the Brink of War? (1 Viewer)

ren hoek said:
@adamjohnsonnyc

that super intense guy at Think Progress who racks up RT's pointing out how much NRA money people in Congress take after each school shooting should do the same with Raytheon and Lockheed Martin after US arms are used to incinerate a bus full of Yemeni children
Click to expand...
WE DO (hopefully that specific guy will, too).  But your compatriots who claim to be against these things vote in guys like Trump who raise the military budget by a hundred billion or so.

Can we at least agree that things have actually gotten worse under Trump?

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Henry Ford said:
WE DO (hopefully that specific guy will, too).  But your compatriots who claim to be against these things vote in guys like Trump who raise the military budget by a hundred billion or so.

Can we at least agree that things have actually gotten worse under Trump?
Click to expand...
Things have definitely gotten worse.  I guess my problem is how little attention anyone seems to be paying to it.  If it's a Saudi or Israeli atrocity, it's like it didn't happen.  If it's a regime change target committing war crimes, it's primetime cable news.  

 
ren hoek said:
Things have definitely gotten worse.  I guess my problem is how little attention anyone seems to be paying to it.  If it's a Saudi or Israeli atrocity, it's like it didn't happen.  If it's a regime change target committing war crimes, it's primetime cable news.  
Click to expand...
Thank you.  That's been a long time coming.

The fact that the news spends more time on the "regime change targets" committing crimes shouldn't be a real shocker.  It's because they can get quotes, insight, plans, understanding, and future possible movements by the government and it becomes a story they can use to sell papers, clicks, and air time.  That's the problem with putting a liar whose whole career has been built on manipulating the media in office, it's going to get so much worse.  His administration will freeze out the stories it doesn't want to comment on completely and push whole discussions on stories it doesn't mind having on air.  Even more than previous administrations.

Unfortunately, the ability to manipulate the media is a feature of our system.  It's best to try to keep people who use that as their entire platforms out of office in my opinion.

 
timschochet said:
At some point I’m going to have to shell out the money for the Washington Post and New York Times. I know it’s not much; I just haven’t done it. 
Click to expand...

The State Department has approved a resumption of weapons sales that critics have linked to Saudi Arabia’s bombing of civilians in Yemen, a potential sign of reinvigorated U.S. support for the kingdom’s involvement in its neighbor’s ongoing civil war.
Click to expand...
 
timschochet said:
If that is true I invite ren hoek to comment. 
Click to expand...
This war has been going on with US support for over 1,200 days.  While Trump's reversal on a particular type of weaponry sale to SA is uniquely barbaric in its own right, it essentially amounts to window dressing on an already disastrous humanitarian crisis.  Placating the Saudis was something Obama felt was a key condition for the Iran deal to work.  And so he relented.  

A US-backed Saudi airstrike on a wedding in Yemen has killed at least 20 people (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/yemen-airstrike-wedding-party-killed-injured-bani-qayis-saudi-coalition-latest-updates-a8317826.html …). Trump has increased support for Saudi's war, but what Obama did tells us a lot about our political spectrum when it comes to the lives of foreign civilians. A quick look:

"No president since Franklin Roosevelt courted Saudi Arabia as zealously as did Obama," authorizing "more arms sales than any other U.S. President" as "a way to placate the Saudis" for the Iran nuclear deal, which Riyadh opposed.

Another way to "placate" Saudi was for Obama to "[give] his approval" for US support of the attack on Yemen. In WH, "there was little real debate," despite "concerns... that the Saudi-led offensive would be long, bloody and indecisive."

As death count piled up, Obama "officials tried to help the Saudis improve their targeting" via an "expanded" and "broadened" target list; they also "wanted to help... implement ways of investigating" to "avoid the same kind of thing happening again."

Finally in 2016, after more than a year of backing the bombing, Obama admin cut back a portion of US arms sales to Saudi — cluster munitions in May 2016 and guided missiles in December 2016

but cooperation in bombing continued, w/ the US “[continuing] to refuel coalition aircraft.” But don’t worry, an admin "official said that the United States would refocus training with the Saudi Air Force in how to better choose bombing targets."

This move — stopping a few sales but continuing to take part in the bombing — was apparently deemed sufficient even though, as one Obama official later put it, the bombing “was going so off the rails it was destroying the country.”

https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/988454482290888705
Click to expand...
This won't stop any delusion of Obama as the mythical pragmatist, but it should.  Or maybe selling out Yemenis to a terrorist state, famine, and untold death and destruction is just the dark conclusion of his pragmatism.  Obama personally greenlit the war on Yemen from the US side.  He kissed the ring just like the rest of them.  

 
ren hoek said:
This war has been going on with US support for over 1,200 days.  While Trump's reversal on a particular type of weaponry sale to SA is uniquely barbaric in its own right, it essentially amounts to window dressing on an already disastrous humanitarian crisis.  Placating the Saudis was something Obama felt was a key condition for the Iran deal to work.  And so he relented.  

This won't stop any delusion of Obama as the mythical pragmatist, but it should.  Or maybe selling out Yemenis to a terrorist state, famine, and untold death and destruction is just the dark conclusion of his pragmatism.  Obama personally greenlit the war on Yemen from the US side.  He kissed the ring just like the rest of them.  
Click to expand...
And bowed.

 
But weapon sales to the Saudis are generating "jobs, job, jobs." Remember when McMaster and Kushner high-fived to celebrate the signing of diplomatic and arms agreements during the 2017 trip to visit the king?

 
Cutting off refueling to the coalition likely would make it extremely difficult to sell more weapons to the Saudis and Emiratis, but that is not a good reason to ignore evidence and expert advice and then lie to Congress. Opponents of the war have been trying to block arms sales to both countries for years, and this just gives them one more reason to keep trying. The U.S. should not be in the business of arming governments that we know will use them to commit war crimes, and that certainly applies to the Saudis and the UAE as long as the war on Yemen continues. The longer that the war drags on, and the more civilians that the coalition kills using U.S.-made weapons, the more politically toxic arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE will become. In the end, Pompeo’s decision to flout the law and lie to Congress will just make opposition to future arms sales that much more intense.

Pompeo Lied to Congress About Yemen to Protect Arms Sales

 
Hey @NFL2DFwasn't trying to drive you off or anything. My point was that the stuff that Trump partly ran on, what he claimed he was angry about - were things that he really didn't care about, didn't know about. Did Trump care about politicization of intelligence? No. Did he even understand it? No. Did Trump care about the US running around like were the client state and they were the global partner? No. Did Trump care about any of what he said about Iraq and Syria or did he have any real basis or set of principles behind what he was saying? No. This thread was started under Obama. Our presence there and our investment in resources behind what KSA is doing there now is on Trump though. It would be good if you thought about this stuff objectively when it comes to Trump. We've certainly had troops, special forces and air power there, I know you care about that. Feel free to say whatever, but it's a bad situation and we're in it.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Jeff Stein @JStein_WaPo

Rep. Colin Peterson (D) on siding with GOP on Yemen vote: “Our party gets off on tangents”

Full transcript below. Some estimates say more than 50,000 civilians have died in Yemen

Me: Can you explain your vote on the Yemen resolution?

Peterson: Yeah.  It didn't belong in there.

Me: Why not? Couldn't you just have come back and done another vote?

Peterson: No - we've worked for two years on this farm bill, and I'll be damned if I let anybody screw it up.

Me: Do you have any thoughts about the war in Yemen?  

Peterson: I don't know a damn thing about it, and it should be in there and it -- it didn't do anything anyway.

Me: What do you mean by that?

Peterson: All it did was say they couldn't have a vote or something.  Didn't authorize anything, it didn't - you know.  Our party gets off on tangents.  It's ridiculous.  
Click to expand...

 
urbanhack said:
I thought you said MSNBC was worthless?
Click to expand...
I’ve literally never said that, but that’s besides the point.  They are worthless.  They’ve spent about a billion percent more energy on people’s dumb Trump/Putin fetish than actual news.  

The value of the 2% of the time MSNBC does credible reporting is far outweighed by the 98% of the time they don’t.  

They ignored this war almost entirely when it was Obama’s rather than Trump’s.  In MSNBC’s world, for an entire year, Stormy Daniels was worth 455 stories and the US-backed war in Yemen was worth zero.  

Never mind the fact that they got rid of Phil Donahue for being antiwar, Cenk Uygur for not acting like an ‘insider’, and Ed Schultz for covering Bernie Sanders.  

Who did they fire Phil Donahue for?  https://youtu.be/xVR2GSNafDg  :lmao:

If they do something good, as they did here, then I will give them credit for it.  Until it starts doing that on a consistent basis, it should be treated like the joke network that it is.  

 
For some reason, the past 8 or 9 Presidents, Republicans and Democrats alike, have been beholden to whatever the Saudi princes want in terms of foreign policy. It’s funny because certain people always point to how much we’re influenced by the state of Israel, but the Israelis don’t influence us nearly as much as the Saudis do. 

I’d love to blame this and the Khashoggi mess on Trump, and since he’s the guy in charge right now, he deserves it. But honestly I can’t recall the last time a US President really went against Saudi Arabia or even criticized them. They own us. 

 
Here's what happened last time I bothered responding to you: crickets.  It's literally 7 posts up.  It was a complete waste of time to bother engaging you.  If you had any idea what you were talking about, which you don't, you'd know I've posted numerous times that Trump should be tried for war crimes including his role in Yemen.  But it appears you're posting in bad faith and just looking for the next chance to snipe.  Go back to talking about how good the network that platforms Bill Kristol is.  

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
>>And with the final vote 206-203—a margin where the Democratic votes made the crucial difference—one of those aides told him that was "not a coincidence."<<

- I agree with Hayes and the other points in this article, I just don’t understand how the farm bill played a role?
Click to expand...
It's been a while, but I believe the language about blocking a Yemen vote was lumped in with this farm bill and that's how it passed.  Similar to how abhorrent legislation is always slipped in to every NDAA bill.  

 
neat

WASHINGTON — The civilian death toll from Saudi Arabia’s disastrous air war over Yemen was steadily rising in 2016 when the State Department’s legal office in the Obama administration reached a startling conclusion: Top American officials could be charged with war crimes for approving bomb sales to the Saudis and their partners.

Four years later, more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials say the legal risks have only grown as President Trump has made selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Middle East nations a cornerstone of his foreign policy.

Yet rather than taking steps to address the legal issues, State Department leaders have gone to great lengths to conceal them. Even after a State Department inspector general investigation this year revealed that the department had failed to address the legal risks of selling bombs to the Saudis, agency officials ensured that details of the finding were put in a classified part of the public report released in August, and then so heavily redacted that lawmakers with security clearances could not see them.

The concerns will be the subject of a congressional hearing on Wednesday. House lawmakers are expected to question senior State Department officials, including the agency’s top lawyer and the assistant secretary overseeing weapons sales.

Legal scholars say U.S. officials are right to be concerned. No episode in recent American history compares to Yemen, where the United States has provided material support over five years to the Saudi-led coalition for actions that have caused the continuous killing of civilians. More than 127,000 people have died in the war, including 13,500 civilians in targeted attacks, according to an estimate from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

U.S. officials have had full knowledge of the pattern of indiscriminate killing, which makes them legally vulnerable. Legal scholars say prosecutors abroad — including those from nations like Sweden, Germany and Argentina that assert universal jurisdiction over war crimes anywhere in the world — could bring charges against American officials. Although there has been no move so far by any foreign court to do so, some State Department officials who shepherd arms sales overseas are worried enough to consider retaining their own legal counsel and have discussed the possibility of being arrested while vacationing abroad.
Click to expand...

 
Long Ball Larry said:
Legal scholars say U.S. officials are right to be concerned. No episode in recent American history compares to Yemen, where the United States has provided material support over five years to the Saudi-led coalition for actions that have caused the continuous killing of civilians. More than 127,000 people have died in the war, including 13,500 civilians in targeted attacks, according to an estimate from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.
Click to expand...
This might explain Trump’s recent attacks sanctioning the International Criminal Court.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

LawFitz
Are We on the Brink of Food Shortages in America?
Replies
30
Views
610
FairWarning
FairWarning
GordonGekko
OP/ED: J6 Committee's Liz Cheney Embodies The Worst Character Traits Of Donald Trump (6/24/22 18:05 PST)
Replies
26
Views
812
GordonGekko
GordonGekko
Max Power
Every branch of the U.S. military is struggling to meet its 2022 recruiting goals
3 4 5
Replies
203
Views
6K
Max Power
Max Power

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 2 (members: 0, guests: 2)
Top