US Announces New Sale of Warships, Munitions to Saudis

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Robert Barsocchini

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/10/us-announces-new-sale-of-warships-munitions-to-saudis.html 

As Saudi Arabia, backed and coordinated by the United States, continues a war of aggression against Yemen, the US has decided to sell Saudi dictator Salman bin Abdulaziz four more warships as well as munitions and other equipment valued at $11.25 billion.
Saudi Arabia is currently using US ships to block food, fuel, and medical supplies from entering Yemen, with US-manned ships “patrolling alongside”. Doctors Without Borders has reported that the blockade is “killing as many people in Yemen as the bombing”, and the Red Cross and other groups have said it is causing a humanitarian crisis, as Yemen imports almost one hundred percent of its food.
While nationalist news outlet Reuters asserts that deals like the current weapons shipment to Saudi Arabia are “carefully vetted”, independent investigative journalist Gareth Porter asked the Obama regime about the clear “illegality of resupplying further munitions to the Saudis”, and was told only that the US has asked King Abdulaziz to investigate himself regarding his war crimes.
US government sources told Reuters that “Saudi Arabia’s concerns about Iran” hastened the new weapons deal.  Sources failed to mention that among these “concerns” is that Iran’s influence might bring democratic reform to the Saudi kingdom.
Reuters quotes another anonymous US government source who says that by using the Saudis as a proxy to destabilize, starve, and spread Saudi-style despotism to Yemen through war of aggression, the US is “promoting peace and stability”.  Since the US/Saudi campaign against Yemen began, al Qaeda and ISIS have both made major gains in that country.
Obama has a history of large arms sales to the Saudis.  The “world’s largest” arms trafficker and peace prize winner secured the biggest arms sale in US history in 2010, stocking the Saudi dictator with $60 billion in lethal weaponry and equipment, and later hundreds of millions of dollars in banned cluster bombs, which the dictator has since used against Yemenis.
Reporter focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry.  Updates on Twitter.

What Congress Should Ask Hillary Clinton

Posted on October 21, 2015 by DavidSwanson

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/10/what-congress-should-ask-hillary-clinton.html 

There are dozens of Hillary Clinton scandals that I have no wish to minimize. But how is it that her habits of secrecy themselves attract more interest than the secrets already exposed?
Here is someone who has allowed shipments of weapons to countries that effectively paid her bribes. Last May the International Business Times published an article by David Sirota and Andrew Perez with the headline “Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department.”
As the article recounts, Clinton approved a massive weapons sale to Saudi Arabia, almost certainly involving weapons since used to bomb innocent families in Yemen, despite official State Department positions on Saudi Arabia and, I might add, in apparent violation of the Arms Export Control Act.

“In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic enterprise she has overseen with her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing — the defense contractor that manufactures one of the fighter jets the Saudis were especially keen to acquire, the F-15 — contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to a company press release.
“The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire, an International Business Times investigation has found.
“. . . American [military] contractors also donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and in some cases made personal payments to Bill Clinton for speaking engagements.”

Among the nations that the State Department itself criticized for abusive actions (and most of which Clinton herself criticized for funding terrorism) but which donated to the Clinton Foundation and gained clearance for U.S. weapons purchases from Clinton’s State Department were: Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain. In 2010 the State Department criticized Algeria, Algeria donated to the Clinton Foundation, and . . .

“Clinton’s State Department the next year approved a one-year 70 percent increase in military export authorizations to the country. The increase included authorizations of almost 50,000 items classified as ‘toxicological agents, including chemical agents, biological agents and associated equipment’ after the State Department did not authorize the export of any of such items to Algeria in the prior year.”

Also, “The Clinton Foundation did not disclose Algeria’s donation until this year — a violation of the ethics agreement it entered into with the Obama administration.”
Companies whose weapons sales Clinton’s State Department approved to nations it had previously refused included these donors to the Clinton Foundation: Boeing, General Electric, Goldman Sachs (Hawker Beechcraft), Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and United Technologies.
Clinton’s State Department, we can observe in the WikiLeaks cables, spent a great deal of time pushing foreign nations of all sorts to buy weapons from the above companies. Here’s Fortune magazine in 2011:

“Perhaps the most striking account of arms advocacy . . . is a December 2008 cable from Oslo that recaps the embassy’s push to persuade Norway to buy Lockheed Martin’s Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) instead of the Gripen, a fighter jet made by Sweden’s Saab. The cable reads like a Lockheed sales manual. ‘The country team has been living and breathing JSF for over a year, following a road to success that was full of heart-stopping ups and downs,’ wrote the American official. He lists helpful suggestions for other diplomats looking to promote weapons: work ‘with Lockheed Martin to determine which aspects of the purchase to highlight'; ‘jointly develop a press strategy with Lockheed Martin'; ‘create opportunities to talk about the aircraft.’ ‘Promoting economic security and prosperity at home and abroad is critical to America’s national security, and thus central to the Department of State’s mission,’ the department spokesman wrote in an e-mail.”

The Washington Post reported in April of last year:

“On a trip to Moscow early in her tenure as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton played the role of international saleswoman, pressing Russian government officials to sign a multibillion-dollar deal to buy dozens of aircraft from Boeing. A month later, Clinton was in China, where she jubilantly announced that the aerospace giant would be writing a generous check to help resuscitate floundering U.S. efforts to host a pavilion at the upcoming World’s Fair. Boeing, she said, ‘has just agreed to double its contribution to $2 million.’ Clinton did not point out that, to secure the donation, the State Department had set aside ethics guidelines that first prohibited solicitations of Boeing and then later permitted only a $1 million gift from the company. Boeing had been included on a list of firms to be avoided because of its frequent reliance on the government for help negotiating overseas business and concern that a donation could be seen as an attempt to curry favor with U.S. officials.”

Secretary of State Clinton dramatically increased U.S. weapons sales to the Middle East. Between 2008 and 2011, according to the Congressional Research Service, 79% of weapons shipments to the Middle East were from the United States.
Fun as it might be to watch long hours of Congress members asking Clinton why she destroyed emails or how an ambassador bringing peace, love, and happiness to Libya (and Syria) ended up dead, wouldn’t it make more sense to ask her something like this:
Secretary Clinton, the Pope recently asked a joint session of this Congress to end the arms trade, and we gave him a standing ovation. Granted, we’re a bunch of hypocritical creeps, but my God woman, look at your record! Is there any amount of human life you wouldn’t sacrifice for a buck? Can you think of anything that could be found in anyone’s secret emails that would be worse than what we already know about you? There is a precedent for impeaching high officials after retirement. They can be stripped of the Secret Service and of the right to run for any federal office. If an intern were to crawl under that table we’d impeach you by Friday. What in the world are we waiting for?
All right. All right! We’re a bunch of partisan jack asses who will just get you elected if we try any such thing, and we’d gum it all up anyway. But we’re going to keep you here until you answer us this question: how did you get THAT kind of money out of these nasty foreign dictatorships? I mean, seriously, can your people sit down with my staff one day next week? Also, what about drinks, just you, me, and a few of the top people at Boeing? Is that too much to ask?

UK Ignores Barbaric Death & Torture To Become Saudi Arabia's Largest Arms Supplier

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/19/2015 15:02 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-19/uk-ignores-barbaric-death-torture-become-saudi-arabias-largest-arms-supplier
Submitted by Claire Bernish via TheAntiMedia.org,
While increasing cries from the West demand an end to all association with Saudi Arabia, the U.K. government described lucrative public contracts with the notorious human rights abuser as a “priority market.”
Government departments have been actively — even aggressively — steering U.K. businesses into bidding for contracts with the Saudis in the health, justice, defense, and security sectors, according to documents seen by the Observer.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that ministers are bent on ever-closer ties with the world’s most notorious human rights abusers,” said Maya Foa, who directs the death penalty team at Reprieve. “Ministers must urgently come clean about the true extent of our agreements with Saudi Arabia and other repressive regimes.”

As three young Saudis, Ali Mohammad al-Nimr, Abdullah al-Zaher, and Dawoud al-Marhoon face beheading and crucifixion — and another blogger, Raif Badawi, essentially receives a drawn-out death sentence of 1,000 lashes — the U.S. and U.K. governments have been barraged with criticism for continuing political relations. Perhaps inflaming the issue more, according to the Guardian, several of the “most important Saudi contracts” fell under the Overseas Security and Justice Assistance Policy (OSJA) — meant to establish U.K.’s security and justice dealings as “consistent with a foreign policy based on British values, including human rights.”
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn penned an openly critical letter to Prime Minister David Cameron in which he pled for an independent review of the OSJA process:

“By operating under a veil of secrecy, we risk making the OSJA process appear to be little more than a rubber-stamping exercise, enabling the U.K. to be complicit in gross human rights abuses,”  he wrote.

But the U.K. has increased dealings with the kingdom, ignoring the pleas.
In fact, the U.K. is now Saudi Arabia’s largest arms dealer — supplying 36% of its imports. According to the Guardian,

“U.K. business[es] want to capitalize on the fragile situation in the Middle East. A 2013 document, written by an official at U.K. Trade and Investment, the body charged with promoting business interests, outlines how the region’s ‘global policing and security market has ballooned.’ Freedom of Information requests show that the U.K. Trade and Investment Defense and Security Organization (UKTI) is courting the Saudis and that civil servants met Saudi military delegations at the U.K.’s Security and Policing arms fair this year and last summer at the Farnborough airshow. Civil servants were also due to meet Saudi representatives at the major arms expo in London’s Docklands last month, just as the regime upheld a ruling that al-Nimr was to be executed and his body crucified and left in public view for three days.”

Many are struggling to understand why the U.K. would seek to supply arms to the same country from which it withdrew a £5.7 million (nearly $8.8 million) prison contract less than a week ago — reportedly due to yet another impending lashing: this time of 74-year-old Karl Andree for transporting homemade wine in his vehicle.

“The Saudi regime has an appalling human rights record,” said Andrew Smith of the Campaign Against Arms Trade, “yet it remains the world’s largest buyer of U.K. weapons. How many more people will be tortured and killed before the U.K. government finally says enough is enough?”

Saudi Arabia executed at least 134 people so far in 2015, according to a report from Amnesty International. As Smith noted:

“It seems ironic for the U.K. to be working on healthcare with the Saudi regime at the same time as selling them the means to suppress and kill their own people.”