Thomas Wictor

When I began defending Israel in June of 2014, I was shocked at the blatant lies told by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the United Nations. Well, the lies told about Saudi Arabia are worse. The difference is that the Saudis are willing to use ruthless judo in a way that Israelis have so far rejected. I now believe that the Saudis have set a trap for NGOS and the UN, in a bid to let them destroy their credibility.

As a disclaimer, I’ll admit that for me, NGOs and the UN never had any credibility in the first place. But now the lies are so ridiculously false that nobody is paying attention to them. Here’s the latest slander from Human Rights Watch.

Yemen: Coalition Drops Cluster Bombs in Capital

Indiscriminate Weapon Used in Residential Areas

(Beirut) – Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces airdropped cluster bombs on residential neighborhoods in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, early on January 6, 2016. It is not yet clear whether the attacks caused civilian casualties, but the inherently indiscriminate nature of cluster munitions makes such attacks serious violations of the laws of war. The deliberate or reckless use of cluster munitions in populated areas amounts to a war crime.

“The coalition’s repeated use of cluster bombs in the middle of a crowded city suggests an intent to harm civilians, which is a war crime,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch. “These outrageous attacks show that the coalition seems less concerned than ever about sparing civilians from war’s horrors.”

Steve Goose has always had a bug up his exhaust pipe about cluster munitions. Despite being an “arms director,” he has no clue how munitions are used. Are you surprised?

“Oot?”

Here’s his military background: a master’s degree in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a B.A. in History from Vanderbilt University.

See, Goose is typical of nanny-staters. He began with the assumption that cluster munitions had to be banned, and then he worked backwards from there. I’m sure he’s a great believer in “fake but accurate,” meaning that it’s permissible to make false war-crimes accusations for the greater good of preventing civilization from defending itself against manly terrorists heroically refusing to leave the seventh century.

The Human Rights Watch (HRW) “investigation” into the alleged use of cluster munitions in Sana’a on January 6, 2016, follows their usual pattern. There’s no unambiguous physical evidence, and their “eyewitness accounts” are worthless. The photos that HRW provides have no value whatsoever.

That’s the bottom half of an American SUU-30H/B Aircraft Dispenser and Bomb. When the two halves of an SUU-30 are filled with 650 baseball-sized BLU-63/B bomblets, the weapon becomes the CBU-58.

Here’s the BLU-63/B bomblet or submunition.

Dropping the CBU-58 causes an explosive to blow apart the two SUU-30 clam shells longitudinally, and the 650 BLU-63/B bomblets inside then arm themselves by spinning in the air.

The bomblets detonate on impact.

According to HRW, the US sold the Saudis 1000 CBU-58 bombs between 1970 and 1995. Each CBU-58 costs $3154 in today’s dollars. Let’s say the Saudis invested $4 million over 25 years, or $160,000 a year. The CBU-58 has a one-year warranty; the SUU-30 that HRW photographed was manufactured in 1978.

So here’s what HRW wants you to believe: The Saudi-led Coalition deliberately targeted civilians with a weapon 38 years past its sell date.

Why? The CBU-58 is like Stone Age technology. Unguided 500-lb (227 kg) Mk-82 bombs cost $2792 each versus the CBU-58’s $3154. Dropping MK-82s could’ve wiped out entire city blocks. The Saudis have the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Strike Eagle. Here’s one carrying 16 Mk-82 bombs.

If the Saudis want to commit war crimes, they’re more than capable of doing so. There were no casualties in the cluster-bomb attack in Sana’a on January 6, 2016. Why not? The Saudis use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for surveillance. Couldn’t they have killed at least one person?

Here are two BLU-63/B bomblets that HRW said “broke apart on impact.”

They broke apart and disarmed themselves. How considerate of them!

See the squares? That’s the fragmenting inner shell. Steel sheet is fed through a roller that scores the diamond shapes into the metal. Then the scored sheet is stamped into hemispheres that are put inside the outer shells. The BLU-63/B uses the M219 fuse (red arrow below) for detonation.

When the BLU-63/B goes off, all those steel diamonds spray in all directions with the speed of bullets.

Unexploded BLU-63/B bomblets are so unstable that explosive-ordnance disposal (EOD) technicians generally detonate them in place. If you pick up a BLU-63/B, it’ll blow up in your face.

Credibility schmedibility

Houthis say that these photos show the damage caused by the Saudi cluster-munition attack of January 6, 2016.

What’s funny is that the one weapon not responsible for that destruction is cluster munitions. There’s no fragmentation anywhere. The 650 BLU-63/B submunitions of the CBU-58 are like a tornado of razor blades. And the photos of empty SUU-30 dispensers in Yemen don’t matter.

The US dropped over 18,000 CBU-58s on Iraq during Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. American allies have used tens of thousands more. Israel has dropped GBU-58s in Syria and Lebanon multiple times. The entire Middle East is littered with empty SUU-30 dispensers. HRW provides us with no evidence whatsoever that the SUU-30s in Yemen were dropped by the Saudi-led Coalition.

Most areas bombed with CBU-58s are under the control of Shi’ite Muslims, meaning Iran. It would be a piece of cake to have smuggled hundreds of SUU-30 dispensers into Yemen years ago, just in case they were needed to smear the Saudis.

How about MY credibility?

In doing research for this post, I came across some very important photos. During the Gaza war of 2014, I said that all of the images of “unexploded Israeli bombs” were fake. They were harmless casings brought in and placed on the ground.

These “unexploded Israeli bombs” were always heavily weathered, and/or they were the wrong color.

Well, look what I found while debunking the latest lies from Human Rights Watch.

They’re Jordanian.

Straining my credibility further

My theory is that the Saudi-led war in Yemen is the most successful military deception (MILDEC) operation in human history. The US, Saudi Arabia, and twelve other nations opened the Military Operations Center (MOC) in Amman, Jordan, in early 2013. It tried to help the Southern Front of the Free Syrian Army in Daraa Governorate fight Bashar al-Assad, the Iranians, and the Afghan and Iraqi militias.

President Obama is too indecisive to win wars—most western leaders have that problem—so it became clear to the Arab League that they’d have to engage in ground combat themselves, using large numbers of special forces.

In Yemen, the Iran-backed Houthis took over the capital of Sana’a in September of 2014. President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi fled Yemen on March 25, 2015, and the Saudi-led Coalition began Operation Decisive Storm the next day. Critics have said that this proves that the Saudis had no plan and just…went nuts! They panicked, like little kids.

Balderdash.

The Gulf Cooperation Council had watched the Houthis take up arms against the rest of the country for years. By early 2014 it was obvious that another major war in Yemen was inevitable; it was also painfully obvious that the western powers lacked the will to militarily confront Iranian imperialism, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State. So the Gulf Cooperation Council drew up a war plan that would keep the world focused on Yemen. The best way to do that was to let unfounded accusations by liars like Human Rights Watch go unchallenged.

While everyone was wringing their hands over Yemen, nobody saw what was happening in Syria. Here’s what the Congressional Research Service reported to the US Congress on September 8, 2015.

Well, whattaya know! Who could’ve predicted that?

Human Rights Watch has been punked, played, abused, screwed, and robbed of its last molecule of credibility. Dummies. They underestimated the AY-rabs and the Jee-YEWS.

Bigots tend to be idiots. In the photo below, can you tell the difference between the US Navy SEAL, the French special operator, the Saudi special operator, and the Pakistani special operator?

Of course not. After fifteen years of intensive training together, there’s no real difference. Human Rights Watch still thinks of Arabs as savages.

But you know what? The Arabs don’t care. They’ve got wars to win. Steve Goose’s opinion is as relevant as this person’s.