Saudis carrying out US orders in Yemen: Stephen Lendman

Press TV has conducted an interview with Stephen Lendman, an author and radio host in Chicago, about Iran condemning as “totally inhumane and spiteful” a recent move by Saudi warplanes to block an Iranian plane carrying medical stuff for crisis-hit Yemen.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: The Saudis remained defiant in the face of international laws, they are preventing much needed humanitarian aid from reaching the people of Yemen and that is when the outgoing UN envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar has stated the necessity for humanitarian aid and assistance for the people of Yemen?

Lendman: I just wrote about this yesterday. I wrote about how everything going on in Yemen is occurring from orders issued in Washington.

Yemen is Obama’s war; there is no question about it. It was planned months ago. The Saudis would never be doing any of this or the other [Persian] Gulf state allies or Egypt or any other country involved in this atrocity going on. I call it Obama’s latest atrocity.

And literally - I made this statement - there were shipments of aid, humanitarian aid, food, water and medical supplies, other things vital to life that need to come in by air and by sea not only from Iran but from other countries that are literally being blockaded and not allowed to come in and in my article that I wrote yesterday, I accused Washington mainly for wanting to starve Yemenis to death or kill them for lack of medical care for serious wounds.

And these fatalities will never show up in the official statistics, only the battlefield, the war-related casualties would get counted but the people who perish from other reasons, from starvation, from medical neglect, we will never hear about those that make it end up being multiple times greater than the war time related casualties.

Press TV: Mr. Lendman, how do you perceive events transpiring in Yemen? A humanitarian crisis is unfolding, the Saudis have stated that they have ended their operations in Yemen but the attacks still continue, women and children are suffering as a result of the attacks, there is no UN mandate for what Saudi Arabia is doing and in the face of all of this the United States is still supporting the Saudi airstrikes?

Lendman: Absolutely. America is ordering them. Obama absolutely wants no peace in Yemen. He wants continued war, escalated war, mass slaughter, mass destruction, and mass human misery. I would say this categorically, one phone call from Obama to King Salman or any of the Saudi officials and the bombing would stop right away.

It would stop and it would not start again but Obama wants the exact opposite. He wants continued war, the same thing that is being going in all of the other war zones, all the other war theaters that America is responsible for, from Afghanistan to Iraq, to Syria, to Libya and now Yemen.

All of this is going on, millions of people affected in these countries, millions of deaths from all reasons aside from battlefield casualties and this is the genocide that America is committing against innocent people mostly civilians suffering this and the US media, they yawn and basically you know what is going on.  

This is horrific stuff that you make screaming headlines daily but of course it doesn’t end at all.

AHK/HMV

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