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posted by janrinok on Thursday June 09 2016, @11:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the as-if-we-hadn't-guessed dept.

After repeated claims that Britain's reloading of the Saudi Arabian Royal Air Force's bomb bays does not mean Britain is at war with Yemen – where its ordnance are dropped – the government finally conceded that it is.

In a tense exchange with parliamentarians in a debate on the British sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, Alan Duncan, the government's Special Envoy to Yemen, said: "We are in conflict for a reason".

Duncan's admission officially confirms of what every sensible person has known since March 2015, when Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen's civil war with an air campaign made possible by British planes and British bombs, and for which UK arms companies made £2.8bn in revenues in the first year alone.

To use the words of the UN envoy to Yemen, the "humanitarian catastrophe" precipitated by the Arab world's richest country bombing its poorest has been almost total.

[...] while NGOs and MPs in several parliamentary committees have been sharp in their criticism of the government for continuing to fuel this war, the government does nothing, meekly claiming over and over again there is no evidence of Saudi war crimes in Yemen and that Britain regularly "seeks assurances" from Saudi Arabia that it is not committing those crimes.

In March, the UK director of Human Rights Watch told the arms export control committee that he has personally handed evidence to the Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, complete with GPS coordinates, of Saudi air strikes on civilian targets. This month Amnesty International sent photographs of British-made BL-755 cluster bombs partially exploded in recent months discovered in farmland near the village of al-Khadhra in northern Yemen.

[...] The government is wriggling because, under Britain's own arms export laws, it is illegal for it to sell arms to a state that is at a "clear risk" of committing international humanitarian crimes. Acknowledging the chorus of evidence of Saudi war crimes in Yemen would be tantamount to admitting Britain's complicity in them.

The truth is that the arms trade of a handful of private arms companies with Saudi Arabia is simply off limits to our country's democratic apparatus as well as its civil society.

Source: The Independent


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  • (Score: 2) by Tork on Friday June 10 2016, @06:23PM

    by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 10 2016, @06:23PM (#357942)
    Well, for starters, there wasn't zero information in any of my posts. Secondly... yeah, it must be a hallucination shared by several people, it couldn't possibly be that you had yet another lapse in reading comprehension.
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 10 2016, @06:57PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 10 2016, @06:57PM (#357963) Journal
    I note yet again, absolutely no contribution to this thread. We already had the impression that you agreed with Zzzlort, that some sort of sarcasm was involved, that there were other people replying who for some reason agreed with Zzzlort, and that somewhere at the dawn of time you actually posted something with information in it. That was already known. Your post does nothing to inform us any further. Thus, it remains zero information.

    The original post was in my opinion a heavy-handed, infantile, and very unfunny bit of fantasy (sure, sarcasm was involved in its unholy birth) which had nothing to do with jmorris's post. There is this bizarre implication that if somehow this were to happen, then jmorris would become a military target of Saudi or UK bombing and no doubt learn the error of his ways in the final few seconds of his life. It's a stupid fantasy and completely ignorant of the situation in Yemen. Sorry, that's all there is to it.

    Meanwhile we're up to six posts by you where you assert things (which after the first couple, just consist of asserting what you've already asserted). You have yet to even bother to defend it. Sorry, that's stupid as well.

    Apparently, it's too much to ask you to come up with an argument that doesn't suck.
    • (Score: 2) by Tork on Friday June 10 2016, @07:22PM

      by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 10 2016, @07:22PM (#357979)
      I love how you throw around the phrase 'for some reason' when your unwillingness to see that reason after it has been pointed out to you is the reason you are frustrated with this discussion. You clearly have a reading comprehension issue, here.
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      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 10 2016, @08:02PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 10 2016, @08:02PM (#358002) Journal
        We're up to seven posts now. Why don't you spell it out for me?
        • (Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday June 11 2016, @01:20AM

          by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 11 2016, @01:20AM (#358139)
          Scroll up.
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          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 11 2016, @03:30PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 11 2016, @03:30PM (#358342) Journal
            Now, we're up to eight.
            • (Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday June 12 2016, @05:05AM

              by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 12 2016, @05:05AM (#358534)
              Have a good weekend, man.
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