Rights Group Blasts US «Hypocrisy» in «Vast Flood of Weapons» to Saudi Arabia...

Ben Norton

Amnesty International has accused the US of "deadly hypocrisy" for its massive arms deals with Middle East governments that have carried out war crimes and other violations of international law.

"One of the unspoken legacies of the Obama administration is the extraordinary uptake in the amount of US weapons and military aid that are provided to major US allies like Saudi Arabia, ‘Israel' and Egypt that have terrible records when it comes to human rights," explained Sunjeev Bery in an interview with Salon.

Bery, the advocacy director for Middle East and North Africa issues at Amnesty International USA, called on the Obama administration to "do an about-face on its current policy of providing vast arms sales and military aid to repressive allies in the Middle East."

"Israel" has for decades been the largest recipient of US military aid. It averages more than $3 billion a year, although this figure may soon increase. Egypt comes in second, with $1.5 billion. In 2014, these two countries received about three-fourths of US foreign military aid.

In the past few years, however, one of the most repressive countries in the world has become a key customer for US weapons: Saudi Arabia.

Since President Obama took office, the US government has done a staggering $110 billion in arms sales with the Saudi monarchy - amounting to an unprecedented increase. Like "Israel" and Egypt, Saudi Arabia has long been a close US ally, but the US-Saudi military alliance has grown dramatically since 2009.

Throughout the past year US weapons have kept flowing to Saudi Arabia, even while the United Nations and human rights groups have documented a slew of Saudi war crimes in Yemen.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned the US and UK governments for providing weapons, military intelligence and support to the Saudi-led coalition that has since March 2015 launched thousands of air strikes in Yemen, warning that they may be complicit in war crimes.

The bombing campaign has ravaged Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East. Nearly 4,000 civilians have been killed and thousands more have been injured, with an average of 13 civilian casualties a day, according to the U.N. The violence has displaced millions, incited mass hunger, fueled extremism and pushed more than 80 percent of the population into what the UN has for more than a year called a "humanitarian catastrophe."

Bery told Salon, "The bottom line is that the US government considers to arm the government of Saudi Arabia with precisely the kinds of weapons that Saudi Arabia and its coalition have used to attack civilian communities in Yemen. That's the fundamental problem," he added.

"Nobody should be putting more bombs or weapons in the hands of the Saudi Arabia-led coalition," he stressed.

A report released in February by a UN panel of experts documented coalition attacks on a dizzying array of civilian targets, including refugee camps, weddings, hospitals, schools, homes, vehicles, markets and factories. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also documented Saudi-led coalition use of widely banned US-made cluster bombs in civilian areas.

On Aug. 25, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein called for "an international, independent body to carry out comprehensive investigations in Yemen." The UN Human Rights Council, at the high commissioner for human right's recommendation, had previously tried to create such an international probe, but it was derailed by the US and Saudi Arabia's European allies.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have since urged the UN General Assembly to suspend Saudi Arabia from the Human Rights Council, citing its "gross and systematic violations of human rights abroad and at home."

For several months these leading human rights groups, pointing to the mass atrocities, have called for an embargo on all weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia. The US and other Western countries, however, have ignored them.

On Aug. 8, the US State Department told Congress it had approved yet another arms deal: a $1.15 billion sale of tanks, machine guns and more. This reinvigorated a bipartisan campaign by lawmakers - including Chris Murphy and Rand Paul in the Senate and Ted Lieu and Ted Yoho in the House - to pass legislation barring US arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Source: Salon, Edited by website team