08.18.16
America’s Wehrmacht (continuing)
America’s Wehrmacht is guilty of war crime in Yemen. There simply is no reason to support, aid and abet Saudi Arabia and Co’s terror-bombing of one of the most desperate and poor places in the world.
The campaign of indiscriminate killing – though let’s call it what it is: a war crime – has now been going on for almost a year and a half. And the United States bears a large part of the responsibility.
This US-backed war is not just a case of the Obama administration sitting idly by while its close ally goes on a destructive spree of historic proportions. The government is actively selling the Saudis billions of dollars of weaponry. They’re re-supplying planes engaged in the bombing runs and providing “intelligence??? for the targets that Saudi Arabia is hitting.
Put simply, the US is quite literally funding a humanitarian catastrophe …
“If you talk to Yemenis, they will tell you that inside Yemen this is not perceived to be a Saudi bombing campaign, this is a US bombing campaign,??? [one Democratic Party politician] continued. “What’s happening is we are helping to radicalize the the Yemeni population against the United States.??? This statement was also backed up by longtime Yemen reporter Iona Craig this week, who emphasized to NPR that Yemenis blame the US for the carnage just as much as the Saudis.
Perhaps one of the reasons America’s Wehrmacht is so hellbent on this is to showcase weaponry.
The Patriot missile battery being one example.
A news story that reads like a press release, from Defense One:
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Saudi Arabia used American-made Patriot missile interceptors to shoot down rockets fired by Houthi rebels from Yemen last week, according to a top U.S. military commander …
“Only last week, the Houthis in Yemen fired missiles into southern Saudi Arabia, which was defended by Saudi Patriot,??? Adm. Cecil Haney, head of U.S. Strategic Command, said at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium, an annual conference attended by thousands of military and industry missile defense experts.
The Space and Missile Defense Symposium, you’ll be interested to know, is being held at the Von Braun Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
And that would be “von Braun” as in Wernher von Braun, the Third Reich scientist who developed the vengeance weapon known as the V-2 rocket. (And there he is, long ago, hamming it up with the GIs who captured him at Peenemunde or Ulm or wherever it was. Note cast: There was some pain in his life.)
We snarfed von Braun up on the end of WWII and he later went on to be very big in Huntsville at what was then known as the Redstone Arsenal. The arsenal was transferred to NASA upon its inception and von Braun went on to become of one of the father’s of the Saturn V space rocket.
Here’s another shot. It really shows off his good side.
Because of his role in the development of American rocketry, from intercontinental ballistic missiles to the moonshot, von Braun received a get-out-of-atrocity free card from the American government. And today most of us, if asked, wouldn’t even recognize his name.
However, lessers of the Third Reich were punished for war crimes, and von Braun ran an operation that employed slave labor from the conquered countries. Prisoners were treated as the Reich treated all its concentration and death camp captives.
He may not have liked using slave labor to increase V-2 production, but he did not protest. During the last years of the war, thousands of rag-clad prisoners from the Dora concentration camp unloaded parts for the gleaming rockets and then returned to underground tunnels to sleep, and be beaten, in conditions of almost unimaginable filth and contagion. The death rates were astonishing (five thousand in the first three months of 1944), and, whether or not von Braun saw any of the beatings or hangings to which his fellow S.S. officers subjected the prisoners, Neufeld makes it meticulously clear that “he saw a lot.???
So there’s an almost full circle element to news of use of an American missile system in a campaign justly classified as a modern war crime, delivered in a symposium to sell more missile systems, at the center named in von Braun’s honor.
And as of 2004, it was still very much a bone of contention on whether the Patriot works as advertised or not.
Nb: Americans have no more say in what their military in the great democracy does than citizens of the Third Reich had a say over WWII. That war in Yemen? No one home in the Culture of Lickspittle. Do whatever.