Ralph Nader: Letter To Trump Regarding US Involvement In Yemen Civil War – OpEd
By Ralph Nader
Dear President Trump:
It has become overwhelmingly clear that your Administration has supported with arms sales, refueling, daily operational logistics and other ways and means the governmental actors opposing the rebels in the Yemeni Civil war.
The bombing raids and blockades combine to produce what international relief organizations are calling the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. With an estimated 8 million people on the brink of starvation, with the largest cholera epidemic in the world, Yemen is suffering daily deliberate war crimes affecting civilians, children, homes, schools, hospitals, drinking water installations, food supplies, and other critical infrastructures. These war crimes violate our Constitution, federal statutes, and international treaties, including the Geneva Conventions.
As President, you know full well what is going on and yet you keep getting our country deeper into this deadly quagmire. By any standard of international law, you are a knowing aider and abettor of these war crimes at a level of complicity that approximates being a backroom partner in the broad range of military operations against millions of innocent Yemeni families.
Have you no compassion? Have you no desire to put a stop to this war on civilians, a deliberate war to destroy the life-sustaining goods and services that keep millions of Yemenis alive. Just this week, your allies blew up a new Doctors Without Borders clinic that was about to open. Some of the doctors are Americans. Have you no decency left even to protect American relief workers who display immense courage and love for their fellow human beings? In its July 2018 three part on the ground series about the War in Yemen, the PBS News Hour showed unexploded bombs with the label, “Made in Garland, Texas,” as just one concrete indication of U.S. involvement.
What are the specific legal authorizations? Has Congress appropriated funds for and authorized military intervention in Yemen? Did you not swear to uphold the Constitution when you took office after being selected by the Electoral College in 2016?
History will judge you harshly for not even seeking to be a serious peacemaker, using the major levers you have in this conflict.
What is your response to the American people?
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
PO Box 19367
Washington, DC 20036
