Thomas Paine's version of "you didn't build that":
"Separate an individual from society,and give him an island or a continent to possess,and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end,in all cases,that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore,of personal property,beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice,of gratitude,and of civilization,a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came"
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As a voluntary agreement is struck for forces to withdraw from the port city, two friends recount the horror of conflict in their neighbourhood in Yemen
Four of the six daughters of Majed Al-Wahidi, a teacher: the four children died in an attack in November 2018. From left: Rufaida, 16, Amat Al-Wahhab, 9, Amat Al-Salam and Amat Al-Hakim, 12. Photograph: NRC
Friends Majed Al-Wahidi and Ali Al-Zazai remember the constant buzzing of drones overhead in Hodeidah on 18 November last year.
Majed, a teacher and father of six daughters, had left Ali’s house to return to his home nearby, but went back because he had forgotten his lighter. It was about 5pm and Majed’s daughters were in their bedroom, having taken a break from studying to pray in their modest, corrugated iron-covered home.
“The drone kept hovering above us. I was asking myself what on earth it was doing there,” says Ali.
Ali’s daughter Sonya, 16, was walking along the street towards home. “I looked up at the sky and I saw a flash,” she says. “I didn’t feel anything. I heard an explosion and felt something hit my body, then I got scared. I was screaming that my sisters were killed, but the shell had hit our neighbours’ house.” Smoke was coming from Majed’s home.
“The street was full of shrapnel. My legs were getting heavier. I couldn’t utter a word,” says Majed.
At Majed’s house, two of his daughters, bleeding heavily, were frantically asking people to come and help their sisters. “When we entered we saw two girls half dead, the eldest one about to die. They took her outside the house but there were no ambulances. By the time she reached hospital she had died,” says Ali.
The ruins of Majed Al-Wahidi’s house in Hodeidah City. Photograph: Karl Schembri/N
Four of Majed’s six daughters were killed. Rufaida, the eldest, was 16. He describes her as having taken on the roles of “mother, father, comrade and friend” since he and his wife divorced. The youngest, Amat Al-Wahhab, was nine. She was found holding on to Amat Al-Salam, 14, one of twins, and besides them Amat Al-Hakeem, 12.
Nazeeha, 13, suffered major injuries. Still in hospital four months later, with more than 30 pieces of shrapnel in her body, she remains unaware that her sisters were killed.
School teacher Majed Al-Wahidi at his destroyed house in Hodeidah. Photograph: Karl Schembri/NRC
“I’ve been telling her that three of her sisters are being treated out of the country, and one of them is in Sana’a,” Majed says.
Keen not to set back her recovery, Majed keeps up the pretence. “I disappear for two days, then see her on the third day, to make it look convincing, as if I went to Sana’a,” he explains.
Surviving twin Amat Al-Malik discovered the truth in hospital. She saw a poster bearing her twin sister’s photograph, customary now for the victims of the war in Yemen.
“I didn’t tell her because we were trying to protect her while she was undergoing treatment and surgery,” says Majed. “But when God wants things to happen, they just happen. She saw her photo in the hospital and took it down. That was painful. Everyone was looking in surprise, as she was kissing the photograph and crying.
“This was such a shock for my daughter, losing her sisters and getting to know in this way. Thankfully she was only able to attend [this] hospital after she recovered. It’s as if her sister was alive in the photo waiting for her to recover and come and give her the one last kiss.”
‘They were children’: Sonya tells of the day her friends were killed in an air strike in Yemen
The port city of Hodeidah has experienced some of the fiercest fighting since the conflict in Yemen began four years ago. Now, for the first time, residents have told outsiders their stories of air-raids, tanks and gunfire, death and once-loved homes left as mounds of rubble.
Majed and Ali and their families lived just a few hundred metres from 22-May Hospital in 50th Street, which became a frontline as the fighting escalated.
“The girls who died were like my daughters,” Ali says. His daughter, Sonya, also needed surgery. She still feels pain in her leg but is now able to walk. With their house destroyed, Ali now rents two rooms for his family.
Sonya struggles with the death of her friends. “There was no reason to attack and wound them. They were innocent people in their house. Why attack them? They’re just children” she says.
The World Food Programme estimates that 20 million people are facing hunger in Yemen.
“My daughters died hungry, they hadn’t eaten anything,” says Majed. “I gave all my life to my children, to raise them, just like anyone who puts all their hopes and dreams in their children.
“It is the innocent, simple, vulnerable, poor people who are paying the price. We haven’t seen any minister or people from the high-class affected by this war. Only those who can barely make a living.”
On Monday, Martin Griffiths, UN special envoy to Yemen, announced the first voluntary agreement between pro-government forces and Houthi rebels to withdraw from the port of Hodeidah. If successful it could allow vital aid supplies back into the country.
Ali and his daughter Sonya, 16, who was injured in the attack on their neighbours’ house. Photograph: Karl Schembri/NRC
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has put the number of civilian deaths between March 2015 and 14 March 2019 at 7,072, with 11,205 people injured, although it concedes the numbers are likely to be far higher.
Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled), which is evaluating data on the conflict, suggests that there have been more than 69,000 conflict-related civilian and combatant deaths since 2016 alone.
Majed, a teacher for more than 20 years, feels deeply aggrieved that some of his former students might be involved in the fighting.
“What did I do to deserve this? My weapon is education. Throughout my life, I haven’t held anything but a chalk. I teach children. Thousands of students graduated under my supervision. I’ve been invested in teaching for a good society, not just for Yemen, but for the good of all humanity, so that they can coexist with the rest of the world …
“How could they kill the children of their teacher who spent all his energy to educate them, who held their hands in difficult times. Why abandon their teacher?”
Sonya is determined to continue her studies. She wants to become a doctor, she wants to give people around her “a life and happiness”.
Ali sits with his lute, in the bare room now he rents for his family to live in since their own home was destroyed. Photograph: Karl Schembri/NRC
Ali, a lute player who studied fine art in Aden, asks: “Isn’t Hodeidah meant to be the site of a ceasefire agreement reached in Stockholm just a few months ago? Who are these people [behind the agreement]?
“They talk about a ceasefire, while drones and fighting rage around us 24 hours a day. The sky is in the coalition’s hands, shall we leave the land in their hands too? Where would we go? Yemen is our country …
“We’re not going anywhere, whatever they do. Even if they try to starve us, we will not surrender.”
In spite of everything, though, he believes his country will survive.
“I’m living in Hodeidah and my brother is in Aden. How can we talk about north and south? We have a strong bond with all the country. They cannot divide us.”
The US could have distanced itself from a murderous war. Instead, Trump’s unholy alliance with the Saudis continues
‘Trump’s stated reasons for the veto ranged from specious to risible.’ Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
Expected or not, Donald Trump’s veto of a bipartisan Congressional resolution to end US military involvement in Saudi Arabia’s murderous war in Yemen is an outrage. It will prolong the unspeakable suffering of millions of Yemeni civilians, the blameless victims of Riyadh’s vicious proxy war with Iran and its Houthi allies.
Yet Trump’s uncaring arrogance also threatens the US itself. It is further proof that the constitution’s famous checks and balances are just not working, and that, post-Mueller, this unworthy president is raging dangerously out of control.
Trump ’s stated reasons for the veto ranged from specious to risible. He claimed to be protecting American citizens – even as he denied directly assisting the Saudis and said there were no US regular troops in Yemen. So which is it? The Americans Trump referred to, mostly resident in Gulf states that back the Saudi-led coalition, were at risk from Houthi “explosive boats”, he said. They may also face danger when transiting Riyadh airport. In reality, no US citizen is obliged to brave such shocking perils, and very few have.
Yet Yemen’s civilians have no choice.They need not leave their houses to be killed or maimed by Saudi air force bombers, assisted by US advisers. “Yemen is at breaking point, with 10 million people on the brink of famine. There are as many as 100 civilian casualties per week, and Yemenis are more likely to be killed at home than in any other structure,” said David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee. Trump’s veto is a “green light” for further atrocities, he warned.
Trump also rejected the resolution as “an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities”. Yet on the contrary, his action amounts to flagrant defiance of the 1973 War Powers Act that checks a president’s ability to engage in armed conflict without express consent of Congress. Although interpretations differ, this is not a partisan point. I,t is a matter of constitutional law. And it’s a precedent. This was the first time in history that a War Powers resolution had passed from House and Senate to the president’s desk.
Far from protecting presidential rights and prerogatives, Trump is abusing them. He tried it on again earlier this year, when he declared a fatuous, anti-migrant “national emergency” at the Mexican border – and Congress could not stop him. This week, Trump had a chance to do the right thing, said Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who sponsored the original Yemen resolution. Instead, he had “failed to uphold the principles of the constitution”.
Why is the US Congress, which counts itself an exemplary global democratic paragon, apparently so impotent in the face of such abuses? There are echoes of Westminster here. What do these many hundreds of elected politicians, regardless of party affiliation, think they are doing to earn their pay? How did the US arrive at a situation in which an ignorant, irresponsible, arguably corrupt chief executive exercises such arbitrary power? Trump rides roughshod over the people’s tribunes. And they, with valiant exceptions, let him. King George was a pushover by comparison.
Congress should now move heaven and earth, in the name of Yemen’s starving children and the majority of Americans who oppose the Saudis’ war, to override Trump’s veto. The firm expectation that it will fail to do so reflects a broader failure to properly police the corrosive Trump-Saudi relationship. The oleaginous friendship between Trump and the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, encompasses far more than an irrational desire for continued carnage in Yemen.
Trump and the Saudis have since found common cause not just over Iran, and by association Yemen and Syria, but also over Palestine. The long-delayed, much-hyped “peace plan” by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly pivots on the injection of massive financial investments by the Saudis and other wealthy Arab states. The cash would be used to “buy” Palestinian acquiescence in the permanent loss of large parts of the West Bank and their dream of a viable, fully independent separate state.
Trump’s Saudi-Israeli axis also extends to apparently quid pro quo talks to furnish Riyadh with technological capabilities that could, in theory, enable it to produce nuclear weapons – supposedly to counter Iran. In February an interim report by Democrats on the House oversight committee revealed that Trump relatives, senior officials and business cronies had secretively pursued a potentially multibillion-dollar deal – without reference, at that point, to Congress or the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Trump’s self-serving obeisance to like-minded Saudi autocrats led him to become apologist-in-chief for the brutal murder of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. It has emboldened him to ignore other egregious human rights abuses, such as the torture of Saudi women’s rights campaigners currently held in jail.
All this is rendered ever more alarming by Trump’s now systemic, vandalistic contempt for international law. Last week his administration revoked the US visa of the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, who had been inquiring into alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan. More significantly, his recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights – a blatant pre-election gift to his fellow “strongman” Benjamin Netanyahu – blew apart international legal norms embodied in UN resolutions.
It’s all of a piece – and Trump’s grubby Yemen veto is but the latest proof. Let’s face it. This worst-ever American president, led by the nose by the Saudis, bedevilled by greed and hubris, is a threat to the world and his own country. He has gone rogue. So when will Americans bring him to heel?
The McGlynn: The veto of Aid For Yemen by President Trump is dastardly. Write your Congress Person!
Patients suffering from suspected cholera wait to receive treatment at a hospital in Sana’a. Photograph: AP
Yemen is facing a massive resurgence of cholera in what was already one of the world’s worst outbreaks, with more than 137,000 suspected cases and almost 300 deaths reported in the first three months of this year.
With well over 2,000 suspected cases being recorded every day – a doubling since the beginning of the year – aid agencies fear they could be facing a major new health crisis.
Amid mounting concern over the return of the epidemic – which first broke out in the war-devastated country in 2016 – aid agencies are reporting cases in 21 out of 23 governorates, with children under five making up a quarter of those affected.
Despite the spread, however, the outbreak has been worst in six governorates, including in the Red Sea port of Hodeidah, and Ibb, in the south of Yemen, according to Save the Children.
The latest surge in cholera cases threatens to further complicate the already dire humanitarian situation.
The spread of the waterborne disease has been exacerbated by the collapse of Yemen’s health system, in a country where 17.8 million people lack access to safe water and sanitation services.
Although the alarm had already been raised in February and March over cases, which had reached 1,000 a day, by April health workers were reporting an increase of close to 150% since then.
According to World Health Organization data released this month, more than 108,000 cases had been reported this year until 17 March, in comparison with 371,000 cases in the whole of the last year, with the trend of suspected cases up 24%. The figures are edging closer to those of the 2017 outbreak, when 1 million cases were reported.
Yemenis at a cholera treatment centre in Sana’a. Photograph: Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images
The prospect of a major new cholera epidemic, exacerbated by both the advent of rains and the difficulties for humanitarian workers in reaching conflict affected areas, comes with no end to the violence in sight.
The warnings coincide with the decision by President Donald Trump on Tuesday to veto a resolution passed by Congress to end US military assistance in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen – seen as a significant political message.
“This resolution is an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities, endangering the lives of American citizens and brave service members, both today and in the future,” Trump wrote in explaining his veto.
The US provides billions of dollars of arms to the Saudi-led coalition fighting against Iran-backed rebels in Yemen with members of Congress expressing concern about the thousands of civilians killed in coalition airstrikes since the conflict began in 2014.
The fighting in the Arab world’s poorest country has also left millions suffering from food and medical care shortages and has pushed the country to the brink of famine.
David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid group, said: “This veto by President Trump is morally wrong and strategically wrongheaded. It sets back the hopes for respite for the Yemeni people, and leaves the US upholding a failed strategy.”
Bush’s Five Big Lies That Led to the Iraq Quagmire
These are the five lies Bush told that Ralph Nader documented to impeach him.
Weapons of Mass Destruction. The weapons have still not been found. Nader emphasized, “Until the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was our government’s anti-communist ally in the Middle East. We also used him to keep Iran at bay. In so doing, in the 1980s under Reagan and the first Bush, corporations were licensed by the Department of Commerce to export the materials for chemical and biological weapons that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney later accused him of having.” Those weapons were destroyed after the Gulf War. George W. Bush’s favorite chief weapons inspector, David Kay, after returning from Iraq and leading a large team of inspectors and spending nearly half a billion dollars told the president We were wrong. See: David Kay testimony before Senate Armed Services Committee, 2004-01-28.Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) ’s Europe division, revealed that in the fall of 2002, George W. Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.
Iraq Ties to Al Qaeda. The White House made this claim even though the CIA and FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) repeatedly told the Administration that there was no tie between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. They were mortal enemies — one secular, the other fundamentalist.
Saddam Hussein was a Threat to the United States. In fact, Saddam was a tottering dictator, with an antiquated, fractured army of low morale and with Kurdish enemies in Northern Iraq and Shiite adversaries in the South of Iraq. He did not even control the air space over most of Iraq.
Saddam Hussein was a Threat to his Neighbors. In fact, Iraq was surrounded by countries with far superior military forces. Turkey, Iran and Israel were all capable of obliterating any aggressive move by the Iraqi dictator.
The Liberation of the Iraqi People. There are brutal dictators throughout the world, many supported over the years by Washington, whose people need liberation from their leaders. This is not a persuasive argument since for Iraq, it’s about oil. In fact, the occupation of Iraq by the United States is a magnet for increasing violence, anarchy and insurrection.
The Department of Defense announced today the death of three Marines who were supporting Operation Resolute Support.
The following Marines died April 8 while conducting combat operations in Parwan province, Afghanistan.
Cpl. Robert A. Hendriks, 25, of Locust Valley, New York.
Sgt. Benjamin S. Hines, 31, of York, Pennsylvania.
Staff Sgt. Christopher K.A. Slutman, 43, of Newark, Delaware.
These Marines were assigned to 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division, Marine Forces Reserve.
The Pentagon has identified two U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan while involved in combat operations Friday in Kunduz Province.
The men were identified Saturday as Spc. Joseph P. Collette, 29, of Lancaster, Ohio, and Sgt. 1st Class Will D. Lindsay, 33, of Cortez, Colorado. Collette was assigned to the 242nd Ordnance Battalion, 71st Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group, and Lindsay was assigned to 2nd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne). Both were based at Fort Carson, Colorado.
“The 71st Ordnance Group … is deeply saddened by the loss of Spc. Joseph P. Collette. We extend our deepest sympathies and condolences to his family and friends,” Col. David K. Green, commander of 71st Ordnance Group, said in a statement.
The fatalities bring to four the number of U.S. soldiers killed so far this year in Afghanistan. The deaths underscore the difficulties in bringing peace to the war-ravaged country.
Save the Children is the world’s leading independent organisation for children and has been working with families, communities and local authorities in Iraq since 1991, leading NGOs in general relief and development programs.Save the Children is currently responding to the needs of internally displaced persons (IDP) and the Syrian refugees in Iraq, in camps and non-camp settings. Our goal is for children in Iraq to be supported in raising their voices and attaining their rights, especially the right to participate in decisions affecting their lives. They should have access to quality education, health and protection services. We are increasing access to community based services that protect, educate and improve quality of life for children. We are ensuring that there is an increased participation of boys and girls in age appropriate activities and services. We are ensuring that children benefit from government actions that create an environment of awareness and accountability to uphold child rights. We are also developing new resources and innovative practices that support our work for children and youth.In Iraq, Save the Children’s interventions include Child Protection, Education, Food Security and Livelihoods, Shelter and Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), reaching vulnerble children and families in northern and central Iraq. Save the Children’s programs are implemented through field offices in Erbil, Dohuk, Sulaymaniyah, Kirkuk and Kalar, with a country office located in Erbil.
Dema, standing in the doorway of her home in Radfan village, is among the children treated for cholera and malnutrition by mobile health teams. A quarter of Yemen’s 28 million population are starving and nearly half a million children under the age of five are severely malnourished. The crisis means millions of school children face uncertainty. About 5 million are at risk of being deprived of their right to education, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN Ocha). Thousands of unpaid teachers have refused to attend classrooms, leading to school closures
Yemen War Child. With Yemen in the grip of the biggest and most rapidly spreading cholera epidemic on record, an estimated 80% of the population is in urgent need of aid. Clean water and food are hard to come and, with the millionth cholera case on the horizon, the country’s health system is on the verge of collapse
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