Cluster bombs

On occasion of the CIA’s 70th anniversary, Lars Schall talked with US researcher Douglas Valentine about the Central Intelligence Agency. According to Valentine, the CIA is “the organized crime branch of the U.S. government”, doing the dirty work for the rich and powerful. Douglas Valentine is the author of the non-fictional, historical books The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, The Strength of the Wolf, The Strength of the Pack, and The CIA as Organized Crime.
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On Monday 10th July, a ruling was handed down by London’s High Court, which should, in a sane world, exclude the UK government ever again judging other nations’ leaders human rights records or passing judgment on their possession or use of weapons.
The Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) lost their case to halt the UK selling arms to Saudi Arabia, the case based on the claim that they may have been used to kill civilians in Yemen.

People inspect the aftermath of a Saudi-led coalition airstrike on a busy funeral hall in Sanaa, Yemen, Saturday, Oct. 8, 2016.
(OPINION) — Fake news was one of the biggest themes of 2016, and Donald Trump and his supporters on the alternative right were not the only culprits.
One important manufacturer of fake news was the British government, especially when it came to ministerial statements on tragic, war-torn Yemen.

A Houthi rebel man holds a cluster bomb fragment after a Saudi-led airstrike in Yemen’s capital, Monday, April 20, 2015. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)
British Defense Secretary Sir Michael Fallon today announced, and Saudi Arabia formally confirmed, that the Saudi military has been dropping British-made cluster munitions on Yemen over the course of their 20 month war in Yemen.

A young boy who lost his leg in the Yemen war uses a prosthetic limb at a government-run rehabilitation center in Sanaa, Yemen, Saturday, March 5, 2016. (AP Photo)
A British government analysis has indicated that British-made cluster bombs have been used by Saudi Arabia-led forces in the war in Yemen.
The defence secretary, Michael Fallon, is among ministers to have been made aware of the analysis, sources told The Guardian.

The shift is surprising.

At first sight, compassion appears to loom large in ‘mainstream’ politics and media. When the American and British governments target countries like Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, ‘compassion’ is always at or near the top of the agenda.

The preposterous ironies of President Obama’s unapologetic visit to Laos on September 6 have not yet generated the attention they deserve, but they provide an excellent measure of the self-righteousness of the monstrous continuity of American violence inflicted on the world from Viet Nam in the 1950s to Yemen more than sixty years later.

… a landmark agreement that will save lives and ease the immense human suffering caused by armed conflict around the world. It will reduce the number of illegal arms …We should be proud of the role Britain has played to secure this ambitious agreement … that will make our world safer for all.
— David Cameron on the Arms Trade Treaty, April 2, 2013.

Nuremberg: “a war of aggression … is the supreme international crime”