Kids were killed but the chat leak was funny and that’s what has been the people talk about instead.
Imagine being the poor family, who is stuck living in Yemen because they cannot afford to relocate, whose kid has died by Trump’s bombing. Then all you see in the news about how they joked with emojis in chat killing your kid. “Oh your kid was killed in that emoji airstrike.” Tell me why the fuck you would grow up anything but radicalized.
Houthis are the only international actor acting in open military opposition to the genocide in Gaza. They are doing their best to enforce a shipping blockade pending a cessation of Israeli war crimes. The US obviously wants the genocide to continue, as well as all shipping trade through the area.
That’s because anyone who has been paying attention to geopolitics over the last two years knows why the US is bombing Yemen…
Yeah, just to be clear. One of the targets hit was a residential high rise building. Local authorities are reporting over 50 people killed.
The target was one, alleged, terrorist and the building, according to the Houthi PC small group message log, was the building of the target’s girlfriend.
So, the US just killed at least 50 civilians in order to kill a single target. Just to give you a rough idea of the kind of ‘collateral damage’ that is acceptable.
Apparently the USA considers this legally acceptable “Proportionality” according to the wording of the Geneva Conventions, and therefore not a war crime. It is a highly bullshit interpretation according to many lawyers, but they have not been dragged to the Hague over it yet and probably never will be for many reasons. For one because nobody ever takes a swing at the USA in the ICC over anything due to political fallout, 2 because most other countriea are guilty of similar crimes and 3 because it is just too gosh darned convenient for the world power nations to be able to bomb apartments to hopefully kill one guy who they’re pretty sure is a terrorist to keep their shipping lanes open for business. I actually wonder if there is any real legal line of Proportionality that could be crossed, one terrorist in a fully-booked children’s hospital: still OK?
https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/proportionality
Personally I think any extrajudicial executions are unacceptable. If the guy is a terrorist then arrest, try and convict him. If that’s “too hard” then the answer is not to send a drone strike at an apartment building, or a wedding, or a hospital.
You forgot to mention the fact that the US is not a member of ICC
ICC is still arguably able to set precedent in interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and Customary International Law, both of which the US is subject to
But the USA did the same in Afghanistan, when Afghanistan was a member state. So the ICC could have issued arrest warants for George W. Bush and B. Obama. But there is that thing that the USA has a law that says it will bomb Belgium if they really do this, so…
Removed by mod
Video games have given me the false hope that we can just send an elite team of ghost assassins to erase the target from existence, but apparently that’s way too costly :( All that training on Ghost Recon wasted…
kill one guy who they’re pretty sure is a terrorist to keep their shipping lanes open for business.
How does killing a terrorist keep shipping lanes open?
Like for real? Or is a sort of retorical question of how could killing one individual possibly lead to a substantive enough change in the political landscape?
For real. I don’t see the link to the Suez Canal and the leaked war crime.
Well as far as understand it’s to do with the strait by Yeman, Bab al-mandab. My very limited “knowledge” is from a very “in the background while doing chores” series of YouTube videos.
Rockets have been fired from Yeman at ships passing through the strait. Countermeasure missile things exsist to stop ships from being exploded but they cost a literal million dollars a go. A large % of oil going to Europe passes through there or has to go south around the Horn of Africa. Either way is beacoup bucks so the texts were about killing the guy that was getting folks together to fire the rockets.
I didn’t gleam much relevent beyond that.
Thanks. Now I know what to seach for
The Houthis have launched dozens of missile and drone attacks on commercial ships.
They have sunk two vessels, seized a third and killed four crew members.
Yeah, lots of violence begets violence. Thanks for the link, I gave it a quick scan, will have a read later on.
Oh, the IDF style of surgical precision bombing. How apt.
My dude this war in Yemen has been going on for like 10 years. If the idea of bombing Yemen sounds out of left field to you, then you are woefully uninformed.
I had the opportunity to live in Berlin for a year. I made friends with a group of Yemen students. All of these people had friends, family or relatives bombed to death. Over the course of 2 weeks, one person lost 3 relatives to the bombings…
These people were sent to Germany to study and be as far away as possible from the horrors at home. Away from friends, family, everyone.
I was told that after flying to somewhere near Yemen, it would have taken another 16 hours to travel by road to get home. Their parents refused them coming to visit because it was just too dangerous.
I don’t know how they managed to hold their shit together and carry on even as their families were getting bombed back home.
It broke my heart and I felt powerless to even attempt to comfort them. I’m sure they felt a sense of powerlessness that’s beyond anything I could understand at that time.
It’s crazy when you realize, “oh, shit, they’re just people.” I don’t mean it in an insulting way. I had that experience, too. Travel certainly helps. It’s not even necessarily that you don’t believe that before, just maybe that you didn’t know or hadn’t even thought about it, because who can know everything. But then what was previously vague/unfamiliar words in sporadic headlines in the background is suddenly very real and personal, standing in front of you. It’s a gut punch.
I love living in a multicultural place. I think I’ve personally met someone from almost every country on earth.
I realized I very much do, too, as I got older and had more say in the matter, but I didn’t grow up like that.
Me neither. Makes me appreciate it more, I think.
To think, we can have all that right here in the US of A.
Thanks MAGA!
Sounds par for the course in the USA.
People are literally surprised when somebody reads out actual policy which was signed into law and who voted for it.
Because they “didn’t vote for that”. They voted for lesser evil, which includes bombing Yemen for a decade. The spoiler effect is obvious to fellow voters, but incomprehensively arcane to lawyers.
God I fucking wish we voted for the lesser evil.
For the record, in 2014 Yemen began a civil war and the Obama administration backed the GCC intervention into Yemen, fighting against the Houthi revolutionaries, in 2015 alongside the UN Security Council issuing an Arms Embargo on the Houthis. The US support was logistical and intelligence. This has unfortunately continued to this day, although the previous Biden Administration did publicly announce a withdrawal of that support, but continues sale of armaments to Saudi Arabia who leads the GCC due to condemnation of their strikes on civilians. (The Houthis also strike civilians, mind you).
TBH I think maybe a more forceful approach, a direct intervention to establish a governance complete with minimal casualties and to provide welfare, to the situation at the end of Obama’s term or the start of the Trump term might have been better than just pussyfooting around and letting Saudi’s commit the warcrimes instead. Either that or doing nothing at all and allowing them to kill each other all on their lonesome so as to keep our own hands clean.
Another thing I’m not taking into account with this retelling is the whole proxy-war angle wherein Houthis and Saudis gaining support from various outside influences impacts their own allegiances in economic policy and that by not participating it would leave a gap for another world power to establish a different governance in the region that explicitly supports said world power. The whole region is an important economic position for oil and gas as well as shipping between Europe and Asia.
Specifically the war stats when The Houthi Militia pulls out of a coalition government and attacks the capital.
The Houthi Militia are not the innocents in this war. They started it.
Also, the Houthis are being armed by Iran who is financially supported by China in exchange for oil, and I hate China so that’s another negative in my book.
The Houthis, is a Zaydi Shia Islamist political and military organization that emerged from Yemen in the 1990s. It is predominantly made up of Zaydi Shias, with their namesake leadership being drawn largely from the Houthi tribe. The group has been a central player in Yemen’s civil war, drawing widespread international condemnation for its human rights abuses, including targeting civilians and using child soldiers. The Houthis are backed by Iran. The Houthis emerged as an opposition movement to Yemen president Ali Abdullah Saleh, whom they accused of corruption and being backed by Saudi Arabia and the United States.
Both are really serious problems in their own right, one’s just a little closer to home
They leveled a building to hit 1 target
Are you actually asking?
The Houthi’s are an Iranian controlled terrorist organization that have been attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea since November 2023.
The Houthis have sunk two vessels and killed four crew members, forcing a lot of shipping to Europe to be diverted around the South of Africa.
The US and allies have been fighting the Iranian-backed Houthis for over a decade, this is just a recent resurgence following the war in Israel.
Claiming that the Houtis are Iranian controlled is sheer missinformation.
Yep and it’s much easier and cheaper just to send in a bunch of drones that end up killing a few hundred innocents than to send in special forces that find the target with precision. And that in turn would be a lot easier than to stop actively funding regional genocide and try to calm the situation down diplomatically.
A targeted strike was absolutely possible. So many innocents did not need to die.
It’s to make us forget about the “group chat” (see how familiar and nice it sounds too, group chat). Damage control.
Someone else can probably explain better than me why the “group chat” is not just a group chat but a massive abuse and illegal thing to do.
The Federal Records Act was violated several times due to the disappearing messages feature of Signal they were utilizing for their plans. Jeff Goldberg took screenshots of the messages before they were automatically deleted when all Federal Records are legally required to be preserved for archiving and may not be destroyed except under specific parameters that they obviously did not follow.
https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-overview/required-notices/federal-records-act
Also, by using Signal, which is a secure end to end encrypted messenger, the vulnerability that is built into the desktop sync feature where messages aren’t locally encrypted can result in enemy and adversarial nation states collecting these messages due to them being stored on an infected device which can compromise the mission and risk lives.
They could also have their accounts and subsequently their messages hacked with their information widely publicly available to hackers.
Firendly reminder that this was the real issue with buttery males/but her emails: that Hillary Clinton was using a private email server to circumvent these laws.
And every other US government employee that knowingly emailed to or from that server is also complicit.
Yet another legitimate problem tossed out with the bathwater because it got associated with the maga crowd. Very handy, that.
Point of order. These laws were written because of Mrs. Clinton’s server. She wasn’t circumventing shit, because the law hadn’t caught up to technology, technically it still hasn’t, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
The reason it got “forgotten” is that after they wasted years and tons of money trying to find something to charge her with, they came up empty handed, since it really was just a mistake.
This is bullshit. I’m old enough to remember when the Bush administration setting up their own email servers to avoid these very same exact laws was a big issue for the Democratic Party.
They updated the laws since then. The Clinton administration was the one that passed the laws that W Bush was flirting with breaking. As far as I remember, they also didn’t actually break the established law, they just got close enough that the Dems started screaming about their precious rules and norms.
HWBush didn’t actually have much in the way of laws binding him, but his administration didn’t bother with the Internet. Whitehouse.com was a porn site until '97-'98
The Houthi’s are enforcing their ban on ships headed to or from Israel to enter Yemen’s water territory. They did this as a sanction on Israel because Israel is committing genocide on the Palestinian people. When the US and European countries started bombing Yemen for enforcing their law, they also banned US and some European ships from entering their waters. During the ceasefire they lifted the blockade, and since Israel ended the ceasefire they started banning ships again.
This is simply false.
The Houthis are not a state. There are a rebel faction in a civil war in Yemen.
Even if it were the Yemen government banning ships from it’s waters it’s can’t do that by international law. They don’t own the whole strait.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bab-el-Mandeb
Lastly, a UN resolution passed that outlaws this behavior.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_2722
This is like calling the US now a rebel faction in the civil war in the British Empire.
We won.
America is its own country.
Ansarallah won. The conquered basically all of the territory except for a few towns held by another faction with whom Ansarrallah made peace with.
All of this while under continuous air attacks from Saudi Arabia w/ US intelligence, refueling and weapons. Meanwhile the US supported a complete blockade, including food, into a country that at that time imported 90% of its food.
Once they are recognized by the UN, they can legally act as the legitimate government of Yemen.
The UN isn’t the world police, in case you didn’t know
No, they are the world legislative body.
Of course no country can be forced to follow the UN’s laws, but they are what we call “international law”.
If the UN don’t recognize you, you may be the only government in your country, and you may even be the legitimate one, nationally speaking.
But you won’t be internationally recognized as legally in charge of things like shipping lanes.So that means that for a country to be legitimate, it has to be accepted by every member of the security council? You’re not a legitimate country unless Russia, China, and the US all like you enough? That’s BS.
If the Houthi’s are going to enact a shipping ban then I assume they’re willing to accept the consequences of enforcing the ban.
If the US and UK are going to support genocide, then I assume they are willing to accept the consequences
The Houthis are a tribe. The majority (though not all) represented tribe within the government of Ansarrallah, a government that formed during and won the civil war when Saudi Arabia tried to steal Yemen.
Calling them Houthis is racist and makes as much sense as calling Americans ‘Kennedys’
They have not been attacking shipping. They have been enforcing a naval blockade of a country committing genocide, something that is a legal requirement under international law. When Israel was “abiding” (or abiding as much as Israel ever abides) during the peace treaty, Ansarrallah dropped their blockade. If this is about shipping, the easiest way to stop this would be to stop applying arms to a state engaged in ethnic cleansing.
America has never been at war with Yemen. We got sucked into supplying Intel and support and weapons to Saudi Arabia under Obama because of all three weapons purchases from Saudi Arabia.
Finally, Iran has done very little in support of Ansarallah, in comparison to other countries that are majority Shia.
Calling Ansarrallah Iranian controlled is about as accurate as calling Israel American-Controlled. It’s just another racist way to try to justify the murder of civilians. You know, the unjustifiable except to fascists like the person I’m responding to.
How do we feel about the Houthis killing civilians on trade vessels not bound for Israel?
I wouldn’t know, since a single tribe (a good amount whom aren’t members of the government) hasn’t done that.
Oh cool. OK, how do we feel about the armed combatants from Yemen repeatedly attacking civilian trade ships not connected to Israel?
I’m genuinely surprised it took this long for the US to retaliate.
The US and international allies have been frequently attacking Houthi rebels since January 2024.
There were even memes about it.
The memes may have started in 2024. We started attacking the Houthis in 2016-2017
Definitely, but I was more referring to this recent bout.
It didn’t. It just took this long for people like you to realize it’s been happening.
They have been bombing them since they started. It just didn’t stop the blockade, just like how this one won’t.
The amount of times Republicans said “we killed terrorists” during the congressional hearing, without even once considering that the 53 fatalities from an indiscriminate air strike likely included innocent civilians, is revolting.
With US track record a majority if not all of those 53 people were civilians
This is why the US and Israel get along so famously 👍
If you kill 1 terrorist and 52 civilians, um no you didn’t, they were all terrorists. Problem solved.
#murder #justkillin
You’ve also just cemented the idea that the West is evil in the families and friends of those 52 innocent people, thereby ensuring a steady supply of fresh new “terrorists”.
And the global war on terror continues forever, and “defense” budgets increase forever. All as planned.
In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US labeled any “military aged male” casualty as an “enemy combatant” even if there was absolutely zero evidence they were.
As proven by the fact that the young men related to those 52 people all joined terrorist organizations after the fact.
Political context courtesy of the Arab Center in Washington DC:
TL;DR: The Houthis are backed by Iran, in direct regional competition to Saudi Arabian (and subsequently US) interests, and the war in Yemen is a direct result of 10 years worth of failed intervention by the Saudis.
Excerpt:
Exactly a decade ago, Saudi Arabia announced the launch of a military intervention in Yemen, promising to lead a coalition of more than 10 nations—although some would later end their participation—against the Houthi armed group, officially known as Ansar Allah, that had taken over power from President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. Backed by the United States, Britain, and other Western states with arms and shared intelligence, on March 26, 2015, the Saudi coalition commenced airstrikes on Houthi-controlled areas, initiating a conflict that would drag on for years. Riyadh’s initial expectation of a swift, six-week military operation to defeat the Houthis became a prolonged and costly entanglement that has tested Saudi Arabia’s ability to impose its will on its neighbor and to force the Houthis to give up their control over a large part of Yemen. Intervention Inception
Saudi Arabia’s rationale for intervention shifted over time as the conflict unfolded. At the outset, it cast the intervention as a direct response to President Hadi’s urgent appeal to the Gulf states and their international allies that he conveyed in a letter to the UN Security Council in March 2015. Hadi called for states “to provide immediate support in every form and take the necessary measures, including military intervention, to protect Yemen and its people from the ongoing Houthi aggression.” The Saudis initially conceived of the intervention as a decisive effort to reinstate Yemen’s legitimate government in the capital Sanaa. As the situation progressed, Saudi Arabia reframed its objective as restoring Yemen’s political process within the framework of the Gulf Cooperation Council Initiative, which in 2011-2012 facilitated the transfer of power from former President Ali Abdullah Saleh to Hadi.
The core rationale behind Saudi Arabia’s intervention, however, stemmed from its perception of the Houthis as an Iranian proxy on the kingdom’s border. Riyadh feared that Iran’s influence through the Houthis posed a direct threat to the kingdom’s regional dominance and interests. The kingdom saw the Houthi takeover of Sanaa not just as a challenge to Yemen’s stability but as a potential game changer in the broader Middle East power dynamics. In this context, Saudi Arabia framed its military intervention as a necessary response to protect its own security and regional influence.
Riyadh feared that the Houthis posed a direct threat to the kingdom’s regional dominance and interests.
But while Saudi Arabia believed Iran to be the principal force behind the Houthi takeover, the extent of Iranian influence over the group at the time was, in fact, relatively limited. Although the Houthis depended on Iranian military and logistical support, particularly for weaponry and strategic advice, they were not fully under Iran’s control. Iran, while capable of advising the Houthis on strategic and policy matters, lacked the leverage to dictate their actions. Rather, local factors such as longstanding tribal rivalries in Yemen, the Houthis’ longtime opposition to the central government, and their pursuit of greater political power, were more influential in shaping the Houthis’ behavior. The Houthi alliances with former President Saleh and certain factions of the Yemeni military also played a crucial role in the group’s rise. In other words, Iran’s influence was significant, but it was not all-encompassing, as the Houthis had their own political and strategic goals. Nonetheless, Riyadh persisted in portraying the Houthis as a tool of Iranian expansionism. Paradoxically, Saudi Arabia’s prolonged antagonism may have ultimately strengthened Iran’s influence, as it pushed the Houthi armed group to deepen its reliance on Iranian military and logistical support.
Worth noting The Houthis started the civil war in Yemen.
Yeah the whole “had taken power” in OPs article pretty much shows its bias. The Houthis were never elected into power in Yemen, they forcibly took power after exploiting the peoples’ rebellion against the elites.
They’re brown and poor and our country is deep in the arms trade.
Because they couldn’t fight back
